


Yet They Grind Exceedingly Small

by mildred_of_midgard



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Mystery, Siblings, Suicide, Tide of History Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28069044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildred_of_midgard/pseuds/mildred_of_midgard
Summary: January 1758. Prince William is dead, some say of a broken heart. Frederick wants to absolve himself of blame for William's death. Henry schemes to end the Third Silesian War on his terms. Amalie and Wilhelmine team up to find out what really happened to their brother. Alcmene just wants to be told she's a good dog.
Relationships: Anna Amalie von Preußen & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen, Anna Amalie von Preußen & Wilhelmine von Preußen, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Wilhelmine von Preußen & Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth
Comments: 34
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



> ### Cast of Characters
> 
> Asterisks denote characters who are deceased at the beginning of the story.
> 
>  **Children of Friedrich Wilhelm I and Sophia Dorothea**  
>  From oldest to youngest.
> 
> Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bayreuth  
> Friedrich II, King of Prussia  
> Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Prussia  
> Amalie, Abbess of Quedlinburg  
> Heinrich, prince and general  
> Ferdinand, prince
> 
>  **Other members of the royal family**  
>  Friederike, Duchess of Württemberg, daughter of Wilhelmine  
> Mina, aka Princess Wilhelmine of Hesse-Kassel, wife of Heinrich
> 
>  **Friedrich's retinue**  
>  Christian Glasow, valet  
> Carl von Pirch, page, later promoted to lieutenant  
> Henri de Catt, royal reader  
> Alcmene: current favorite dog  
> *Biche: former favorite dog, now deceased  
> Blanche, Diane, Phyllis: other dogs
> 
>  **Others**  
>  Voltaire, French intellectual  
> *Fredersdorf, lover and unofficial first minister of Friedrich II  
> Frau Fredersdorf, his widow

When the beginning of the end came, Crown Prince Wilhelm was paging through the Bible, trying to make some kind of sense out of the last year. His flesh burned and his joints ached, and he could find no relief in body or soul.

Matthew 5:6. _Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled._

What irony. What bitter, bitter irony. And yet, if he couldn't hope for justice in life, he should remember that life was not the end. _Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small._

All the more reason he would embrace death when it came for him. He shivered, and not only because of the cold, or because of the fever that had plagued him for weeks.

"Letter for you, Your Highness!"

Wilhelm accepted the letter from his page, and forced himself to give the boy a smile that he didn't feel. None of this wasn't the boy's fault, after all.

The seal on the letter was Heinrich's. Out of habit, Wilhelm began breaking it eagerly. There was no one dearer to him than this beloved brother, and he missed him terribly. Then, a split second later, Wilhelm remembered, and his fingers froze in place.

Ever since Friedrich, their king and brother, lord and master, had dismissed Wilhelm from the army last year, reamed him in front of his officers, and sent him home in disgrace, family correspondence had to be handled like a live grenade. Overnight, letters from Wilhelmine, the oldest sister, had gone from interesting and affectionate notes to desperate attempts to reconcile him with Friedrich.

If that was hard, correspondence from Heinrich was a hundred times harder, precisely because he was a hundred times more important to Wilhelm than anyone else. For all his love and unstinting support in this harrowing time, Heinrich's very existence shamed Wilhelm. Despite being younger and not the heir to the throne, he'd received an independent military command before Wilhelm had, and what was more, he'd held onto his. 

Worst of all, he was currently in winter quarters with the King, so any news from him was as likely to be incendiary as it was to be welcome.

And if those rumors that Friedrich had gone on another diatribe directed at Wilhelm's military incompetence had any truth to them... 

Wilhelm had to turn the piece of paper over and over in his hands, taking a deep breath to brace himself.

Of course Prussia needed someone as bright and driven as Heinrich, in a war in which the nation was fighting for its very existence. Nor had Friedrich's favor stopped Heinrich from siding furiously with Wilhelm after the public cashiering. But it still hurt, seeing him not only survive but thrive at Friedrich's side.

 _You can't put this off forever._ Abruptly, Wilhelm unfolded the paper and began to read.

He was dizzy nearly to the point of losing consciousness when he set it down.

It was true, then. All those rumors hadn't been exaggerated in the telling. If anything, what Heinrich reported was worse than Wilhelm had pictured. And--this was news to Wilhelm--it was Heinrich himself who had inadvertently brought Friedrich's diatribe on, arguing with him about Leuthen.

Leuthen had been Wilhelm's last hope. Before the battle, none of his pleas with Friedrich for a second chance had ever been heard. But surely, after the intended surprise attack had been met with the Austrians somehow knowing exactly where the Prussians were, and the confrontation had ended the campaigning season with much of Silesia in Austrian hands, Friedrich would be desperate enough to need his heir at his side again.

The reverse had happened. When Heinrich had launched into a recitation of Friedrich's mistakes and concluded that surely His Majesty could admit that a commander should be allowed to learn from his mistakes, a commander such as, say, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich had doubled down and met accusation with accusation. Now it was Wilhelm's fault that Leuthen had even needed to be fought, it was Wilhelm's fault he wasn't there serving his country, it was Wilhelm's fault that morale had sunk as low as it had.

_He would have blamed the war on you if he could have. We can only hope now that the sheer absurdity of his claims creates a backlash among the other generals, and they unite with me in demanding your return._

Hope? Hope was for fools. Wilhelm had hoped and hoped, and look where it had led him.

He had started drawing up his will when his sister barged in.

The last unmarried sister and thus the only one to still live in Berlin, Amalie had come, not at all to Wilhelm's surprise, to nag him again about allowing a doctor to treat him. He appreciated that his family--his _family_ , not the king who didn't seem to want to remember they were brothers--was standing by him, but no woman could understand what it was like to be a Prussian man and know his entire worth was judged by his military performance.

"I mean it, Wilhelm: you're playing with fire, trying to make yourself sicker so the King will take you seriously. If you keep putting off treatment, you risk waiting until it's too late. You don't have to do it this way. Wilhelmine's practically Friedrich's twin sister, she's bound to get through to him eventually. Give her time!"

Wilhelm sighed. She still believed, or wanted to believe, that his refusal to be treated was part of a power play and that he meant to recover. "Amalie, the Firstborn won't let me redeem myself by throwing myself in front of an Austrian bullet. If my body's doing me the favor of collapsing here in Berlin, why on earth would I try to fight a blessing from God? No doctors."

"Why? Because you still have a family that loves you. If you don't care about me, or your children, or Mina, how is Heinrich going to take this? He was trying to help!"

Mina. Wilhelm felt a sharp pang at the thought of the sister-in-law he wished were his wife, but he steeled himself. Kinder not to let her continue pining after a man regarded by his future subjects as worthless and cowardly. Kinder to her to end it quickly.

"Some help," Wilhelm returned tonelessly. "No, I know Heinrich meant well. It's not his fault. Tell him that." Heinrich, like Friedrich, like Amalie, had a core of iron. He would grieve, but he would endure.

"You tell him that!"

"I'll write to him, but reading forgiveness isn't the same as hearing it. He loves you too. Tell him I didn't blame him, the next time you see him." 

Amalie was about to protest, when the meaning of his words dawned on her. "No, you're not going to die. You're not going to die on me!"

Wilhelm would have replied, but instead he had to snatch at a handkerchief and hold it to his face, as blood began to pour from his nose.

* * *

At each blow of the hammer, Amalie, royal Prussian princess, abbess of Quedlinburg, and bereaved sister, felt her heart beat in time with it. When the last nail had been driven into her brother's coffin and the pounding stopped, she felt that her heart would stop as well.

In the silence that fell over the mourners, she held very still for a long second, as if waiting to see if it would. It kept beating, of course. Was it possible to die of a broken heart?

If such a thing was possible, Wilhelm had. Her once healthy, sunny brother had returned in despair to Berlin, where Amalie watched his body and his spirit compete over which could deteriorate faster.

Standing before his coffin, Amalie could hear the royal condemnation being read aloud as clearly as though she'd been there that fatal day. _I would be justified in cutting off your head...Rule a harem if you like, but never again will I entrust you with a body of ten men._ No one who knew Wilhelm could say he'd ever been the same after that.

Yet Amalie was still convinced she could have dragged Wilhelm back from the brink. Friedrich would have let Wilhelmine wear him down in time, and Amalie would have found some way to make Wilhelm hang on until then.

But then. That second humiliation. That was when his lack of will to live had turned into a will to die. As his body broke down, he took to his rooms, shut everyone out, and compounded refusing doctors with refusing food.

In his own way, he'd outfought Amalie. She'd pitted her will against his, raging and pleading, ordering and strategizing, and he'd won by the simple expedient of doing nothing. In a cruel victory, he died choking on his own blood, just exactly as though he'd been granted that death by Austrian bullet he'd wished for.

Amalie had been the one holding his hand when the choking turned to stillness. Before that, Amalie had been the one to send for the pastor, so Wilhelm could feel he was dying justified in God's eyes, if not in the King's. 

And now Amalie would be the one to write the letters.

Friedrich's wouldn't be the hardest. He had brought this all on them, and he would have to take what he could get in terms of having the news broken to him sensitively. Heinrich's, though…Heinrich's letter was going to be brutal to write.

Amalie tensed just thinking of it. She might not be as close to Heinrich these days as she was to Friedrich, but they'd grown up close in age and often in companionship, and the bonds still held. She respected him even when she fought with him, they appreciated each other's quick wit, and there were always those moments of solidarity when the Firstborn was driving his siblings crazy.

But Heinrich and Wilhelm had been inseparable since Heinrich was old enough to toddle after the big brother he worshipped. Then, as they grew up, he evolved into Wilhelm's most trusted advisor. They'd shared a bedroom, a childhood governor, and a lifetime of confidences.

Now Heinrich must be tearing himself apart over how badly he'd miscalculated in trying to restore Wilhelm to favor, nearly as much as he must be tearing himself apart in the need to remain loyal to Friedrich while blaming him for Wilhelm's demise.

What on earth was she going to say?

* * *

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Wilhelmine cried aloud when she realized what the letter in her shaking hands was telling her.

Wilhelm was gone. Dear, dependable, lovable Wilhelm. Always the family prop, quietly helping out any way he could, smoothing over misunderstandings, tying everyone together. Until his sudden fall from grace last year, when Wilhelmine had found herself in the unaccustomed position of family mediator.

Trying to convince herself this was real, she reread the first part of the letter from Friedrich. Written in what state of blind shock and disbelief she could only imagine, it opened with a description of Wilhelm's good nature and Friedrich's grief at losing him...and then immediately launched into a list of his failings, culminating in his refusal to reconcile with Friedrich.

As one of the people who'd spent months frantically trying to help Wilhelm heal the damage that had been done, Wilhelmine knew firsthand just how skewed this picture was. She understood that from Friedrich's perspective, it looked like Wilhelm hadn't tried, but he simply hadn't been able to find the right words to win Friedrich's favor back, without degrading himself past a point he couldn't live with.

 _Couldn't live with._ And hadn't. Now she'd never be able to bring her two brothers back together. She'd had her chance, and the chance had passed. That realization made her weep almost as much as Wilhelm's death did.

She knew, she _knew_ , that Friedrich hadn't intended for his brother to die still in disgrace. That was why he was so insistent that Wilhelm just hadn't tried. Given time, Friedrich would have played the role of benevolent shepherd welcoming back his errant sheep, just as he once had with Wilhelmine. But time was exactly what had run out.

Now he was dead, and she could see Friedrich struggling to come to terms with that fact in his letter. In a jarring segue after the list of failings--or perhaps this was meant to be another way he'd let Friedrich down?--her brother lamented the fact that by dying, Wilhelm had left a minor as the heir to the throne. Now Friedrich had to abandon his plans to abdicate in Wilhelm's favor and live a peaceful private life after the war. This was the first Wilhelmine had heard of such plans, but with the grief racking him and an endless war buffeting him, she understood why her brother needed to tell himself that.

Friedrich concluded the letter with a plea for pity for a man old before his time, bent under the weight of his cares, unable to refuse the needs of the state at any cost to himself.

Wilhelmine's shaking hands set the paper back on the desk.

People were too complicated. Looking down at the spaniel curled up on her lap, Wilhelmine stroked his fur. He seemed to sense her turmoil, and raised his head to first nose, and then lick, her hand.

"Thank you," she whispered through her tears. On this day when all the world seemed gray and bewildering, a single wet nose came as a beam of light shining through.

Alcmene, Wilhelmine could only hope, was doing the same service for Friedrich, far away on the Silesian border. She and her brother had always praised dogs for their unwavering loyalties, and now she found herself envying the simplicity of their lives. Alcmene would never be asked to stare at a blank page, wondering what words she could conceivably call on to comfort the brother who was her other half for letting another brother die unforgiven.

Friedrich would have to depend on Alcmene for a few hours longer, then, while Wilhelmine tried to find her way through a tangle of emotions to a letter that would somehow substitute for crying into each other's arms.

For the moment, she set aside that daunting prospect and instead picked up her pen to compose a very different letter. This one was for another man she honored with the title of "brother": Voltaire. Together, they'd been trying to use their connections to negotiate a peace between Prussia and France, and now, more than ever, they needed to end the war, whatever it took. _It's tearing Europe apart, and it's tearing us apart._

* * *

"Out, out! The King says out!" Rudely awakening her, the tall man shooed Alcmene toward the door with the other dogs. Half asleep, she obediently started trotting away, but gradually, a few facts dawned on her. She'd assumed she was being ushered out because it was morning, but it was barely evening. What was more, her human was already in bed. When she looked back just before crossing the threshold, she saw him staring at her from where he lay, eyes wide and glassy.

This was all kinds of wrong. Why was she being kicked out at bedtime, when she wasn't even causing trouble? And why was the tall man acting like it was morning, when her human was acting like it was night?

"Diane, hold still! Phyllis, come back here!"

In the confusion while the other dogs ran up and down and all round the antechamber and corridor, barking and chasing each other, and people tried to catch them, Alcmene saw her chance. When no one was looking, she turned around, bolted back through the bedroom door, and made a running leap onto the bed. In the cold winter air, she burrowed under the blankets, making a den for herself. She pressed herself against her human's thigh, and put her head right by his hand. If he was awake, he was always good for pets and scritches. Even when he was sick, even when he was yelling at the other humans, she was his best dog, and he always had time for her.

But his cold and clammy fingers barely twitched, and he moaned a couple of times. Resigning herself, Alcmene settled in for the night. It was all right, she was sleepy anyway. She could smell her human, feel his body, and hear him breathe, and that was all the comfort she needed. Everything would be back to normal in the morning.

Waiting for her makeshift den to warm up, she listened to the sounds from the room. They too were comforting in their familiarity, at least for a while. The door closing. Boots tapping on the floor as the tall man moved around in the room. The hushed sounds as he picked up scattered clothes, the clank of objects being set on and removed from the table. She was nearly caught when he came over to the bed to help make her human comfortable, but she was just another lump in the bunched-up blankets, and she went unnoticed.

So when he was finished, the tall man went to the desk, where he made some papers crinkle. Alcmene's ears pricked up at that. What was he doing there? But then he left, closing the door on his way out, and Alcmene was at last alone with her human.

For a while, her breaths slowed in time with his as she started to drift off. When his breathing stopped altogether, she was on the edge of sleep and only half noticed.

In the morning, her hopes were dashed. The sun was coming up, yet she was the only one awake. Her human should be up by now, feeding and playing with her. He liked it when she and the other dogs competed for his attention while he drank his bitter-smelling morning drink. Then the tall man would come and take her and the other dogs outside for food and exercise.

Instead of all this, her human was lying motionless in bed, while she got hungrier and hungrier, and no one was doing anything about it. Worse, even when she stood on his chest, frantically licking and nudging and barking in his face, he didn't respond. _Wake up wake up wake up!_

Finally, she gave up and jumped onto the table. She knew that made her a bad dog, but no dog could be good on an empty stomach. Spotting half a bread roll that had been left behind, she inhaled it and looked around for more.

There was a cup of dark, sweet liquid that she normally would have gulped down the moment she found it unsupervised, but today it gave off a strange smell that repelled her. Had he started making his nighttime sweet drink bitter too? That was so unfair that she whined in protest.

After a few disappointed sniffs at the drink, hoping it would change, she turned back to the table surface in vain. Just a couple of crumbs and one sticky spot tasting of apple.

When she accepted that that was all there was, Alcmene leapt off the table and tried again to wake her human. She barked, ran around the room, jumped on the bed, pushed at his chin with her nose, and barked again.

Then the door opened. It was the tall man, here to take her outside. Finally! Somebody understood the routine. But he seemed startled to see her standing over her human's body. "Bad dog!" he yelled. It was the angriest voice anyone had ever used with her.

 _Hungry dog confused dog scared dog!_ she whined at him, moving her tail imploringly and begging him to understand.

"Your Majesty?" The tall man ran over to the bed, shoved Alcmene away from her human, and began shaking his limp body, trying to wake him. "Your Majesty!"

Alcmene didn't know a lot of words, but she knew that was a word for her human. She also knew, suddenly, that he wasn't going to wake ever again. Putting her paws on his chest for the last time, she threw back her head and howled despondently.

* * *

_The King is dead, long live the King. The King is dead, long live the King._

Whatever Mina tried to do--read, embroider, play--the sentence kept bouncing around meaninglessly in her head, drowning everything else out and yet not making any sense at all. Friedrich had been the star around which they had all revolved for so long that it had seemed he was immortal, that there could be no Prussia without him.

Yet his funeral was tomorrow. 

The manner of his death was equally incomprehensible. A cup of poisoned chocolate, and a note left beside it saying how much he regretted Wilhelm. Wilhelm. She hadn't even gotten used to her beloved being gone forever, and now she was supposed to remember that the King was dead, _long live the King. The King is dead, long live the King._ She couldn't get the jingling refrain out of her head.

She shook her head, trying to clear it.

Not only were all these facts true, they were so true that her husband had even returned from the front to Berlin. In the coming days, Heinrich would bury his brother, see Wilhelm's young son acknowledged as king, and take up the mantle as regent.

Wilhelm's son--the thought of him never failed to generate a maternal hunger. _He should have been mine._ Married to Heinrich, Mina was doomed to be childless forever, and Wilhelm and his wife had been nothing to each other but breeding animals, generating royal heirs on demand. But she and Wilhelm could have been _parents_ together.

Before she noticed what she was doing, Mina's hand had plunged into the front of her bodice for the thousandth time and pulled out a ribbon, from which a ring and a miniature hung. Opening the latter, she found herself gazing deeply into Wilhelm's portrait, as though the locket could swallow her up and pull her back into a world where he existed.

King Friedrich she missed mostly as a protector, but Wilhelm as a man. His contagious laughter crinkling around his eyes, the warmth and understanding in his expression, and his sheer physical presence. For a man as tall and robust as he was, she'd always been struck by how easily he carried himself, how obviously comfortable he was in his own skin. It couldn't be possible that someone so alive could simply vanish from the earth.

_Dust you are, and to dust you shall return._

Never again, Mina realized in dismay, would she have to remind herself that she was married, and that both her wedding vows and Wilhelm's loyalty to his brother stood between her and happiness. Now she was free from temptation. A bitter kind of freedom. It was just her and Heinrich now: Heinrich flaunting his male favorites, and Mina still a virgin after five years of marriage. She was too sensible to expect the world to be made for women, and too well-bred to let resentment show, but she would have had to be more than human not to feel any.

And yet she would have had to be less than human not to pity Heinrich today. If Mina was feeling thrown off balance by Friedrich's absence, how much more overwhelmed her husband must be, having to step into those shoes. And how he must be aching for the brother he'd grown up with. She should go to him. It would be better than wallowing in her own sorrow, and who knew. Bereavement and shared grief might be a heaven-sent opportunity to make something grow in the barren wasteland that was their marriage.

And not a moment too soon. Through all the years of her husband's neglect, Friedrich's distant benevolence toward Mina had oftentimes felt like the only bulwark standing between her and utter shame at court. The courtiers took their cue from the King, who treated his favorite sister-in-law like a friend. And so her lot had been bearable. Now she wondered what the future would hold for her, the unwanted wife of the Regent.

Resolutely, Mina put her locket back inside her bodice, set down her undone embroidery, and rose.

She found Heinrich sitting forlornly in a chair in his music room. Unbidden, her heart went out to him. Then she saw that he was holding his violin idle in his lap, while gazing at a portrait of Wilhelm that sat behind his snuffbox on the mahogany table. She took it as a sign.

"Heinrich," she said as she came up to him from behind, her voice low and solicitous. She put her hand on his shoulder. "Heinrich, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?"

His head jerked up, startled, and he stiffened. "No. Madam." His voice was thick, as if he'd been crying. 

Shaking off her hand, he stood and put his violin back in its case, keeping his back firmly to her and taking as much time about it as possible. He even moved the snuffbox and portrait aside to make room on the table, although there was plenty of room. Anything to avoid looking at her.

Perhaps if she just kept trying a little more...She held out her hand again, although she didn't touch him this time. "Heinrich. I loved them too. Wilhelm filled up so much space in our lives, I understand how much you must be grieving him. And then to lose the King and in the same moment find out how remorseful he felt-"

Heinrich finally faced her then, whirling around on her so quickly she took an involuntary step back. He held the silk scarf he used to cover his violin in his hands, and he was pulling it so taut his knuckles were white. The hatred in his tear-filled eyes made her recoil. "Don't pretend you know the first thing about it! You understand nothing!"

By this time, Mina was starting to get angry herself. She would have excused an emotional outburst, but this was too much. All she was doing was trying to behave decently toward her own husband. "Heinrich, you're not the only one who misses them. I have feelings too, you know. I've never been so distraught as when Wilhelm died." Now she was crying too. She didn't want to talk any more about Wilhelm. "And the King, I admired and respected him to no end. When the news came, it was like everything stopped. I was so stunned."

"Oh, were you? Well, if you were so enamored of the late King, would you like to keep the snuffbox he used to kill himself, as an heirloom?" As Heinrich gestured at the table, his voice rose into a biting crescendo. "It'll go nicely with that engagement ring of Wilhelm's that he left you in his will." 

Mina gasped and pressed her hand to her chest, where the hidden ring hung. Her husband's indifference she was used to, but not such deliberate cruelty.

Against her will, her eyes followed his toward the snuffbox on the table. Before, it had been only a lovely blue and white piece of porcelain shaped like a chest of drawers, but now it loomed with a more sinister meaning. Was Heinrich saying he'd be happier if she took her life too?

Or worse? Her face grew hot with anger. "If you're implying that I had an affair with both your brothers…or why not all three?" Sarcasm felt like her best defense right now.

Unwillingly, Heinrich laughed once, coldly. "No, not even you could interest Friedrich in a woman. But Wilhelm had a weakness for beautiful ladies, though I would have thought he'd have spared mine."

 _'Mine.'_ As though they had ever been husband and wife in more than name. For a marriage to fall apart and both parties to live as strangers was nothing new, but for it to start that way was a distinction Mina could have done without.

Heinrich continued, "I didn't want to believe it of him, but then he left you his children in his will, cutting out their mother entirely. Now, why would he do that? Is there one more on the way I don't know about?" He looked pointedly at her waistline.

 _I didn't ask him to do that!_ she might have protested, but she wanted to hurt Heinrich. She couldn't deny that she and Wilhelm had committed adultery in their hearts, and that they'd yielded more to temptation than they should have, but she'd drawn the line at outright infidelity, nor would she take all the blame for the failure that was her marriage.

"How could there be?" she taunted him. "No one would believe for a second it was yours."

For one moment, she hoped he would prove her wrong. He stood up, a certain gleam in his eye, and, if sympathy didn't work, then maybe the heat of anger, just maybe...

"Get out."

"I meant-"

"Out."

With what was left of her dignity, Mina curtsied and left.

Later that night, when tempers had had a chance to cool, she returned to the wing where he kept his apartment, as far away from hers as possible. She knew she'd said things that she shouldn't have, and he couldn't have meant all he'd said. He wasn't usually like this, and little wonder, on a day like today. And of course, it was the woman's place to make the first move.

As Mina walked up the corridor, she heard muffled shouting.

One voice was Heinrich's, and the other she recognized after a moment. It was Christian Glasow, his new valet since the cream of the King's staff got divided up by his siblings, while the rest had to look for work elsewhere. She recognized the tone, too. It was what she'd been half-hoping to elicit earlier: not only did everyone know Heinrich favored handsome young men, but rumor had it he picked ones who found a good fight sexually exciting. Unfortunately for Mina, it seemed that trick only worked for men.

"He was your brother!"

"Ferdinand was my only brother after that monster killed Wilhelm!"

And then an unmistakable silence fell. The wall, in its mercy, blocked out any other, fainter sounds from inside the room, but it couldn't block out her imagination.

Schooling her face not to let on to the servants that anything was amiss, Mina continued walking as though she were on some other errand entirely, and forced herself to think about Heinrich's words rather than what Heinrich and Glasow might be doing right now.

_The King killed Wilhelm?_

Mina couldn't believe it. Not the man whom she'd primarily remember for the little kindnesses he'd shown her. The King had made Wilhelm's last days miserable, indubitably, but killed him? The doctors had found blood in Wilhelm's brain during the autopsy and declared that the cause of death. Such an accusation could only be more proof that Heinrich was out of his mind with grief. Yet even if the King had contributed in some way to the death of the man she loved, no one could deny that it had been inadvertent, nor that Freidrich had paid for Wilhelm's life, offering up his own in return.

 _I wouldn't have asked for such a price_ , Mina thought. _Please rest now, both of you._

* * *

Amalie was sick and tired of funerals, and she couldn't believe that it wasn't even the war's fault. A year ago, it had been her mother. The Queen's death at age seventy hadn't come as a surprise, but it had still hurt, more than Amalie expected. Not less because of their lifelong strife, but differently. 

Then Wilhelm, felled like a mighty oak struck by lightning. Like an oak, he hit the ground with a resounding crash, landing squarely on Friedrich. Hardly sooner was Wilhelm laid to rest than Friedrich's remains were being lowered into the quiet plot at Sanssouci he'd designed for himself. Amalie had watched, shaking, tormented by fears that she was to blame. If she'd just waited until she was a little less angry to break the news of Wilhelm's death to him, perhaps her letter would not have provoked his suicide. But she'd spoken to no one of her fears and guilt.

Now Wilhelm was being moved from his country palace to the family crypt in the Berlin Cathedral. It wasn't customary for women to attend this particular service, but Heinrich looked so lost that she'd put her hand on his shoulder and said, "I'm coming with you."

He'd nodded gratefully, and so here she was, back at Oranienburg, where she'd held Wilhelm's dying hand. Wilhelm and Heinrich had been the closest in age to her, and she'd grown up playing with her brothers as much as she was allowed, sometimes wishing she were one of them. It had seemed the boys had so much more freedom; yet today, all she could see was the shackles they bore.

In a way, you could say both Wilhelm and Friedrich were casualties of the war after all. Wilhelm, of course, had been humiliated for his performance on campaign, and while Friedrich's suicide note might have referred only to Wilhelm, no one who knew him, not even Amalie in her worst nightmares, believed that his brother's death was anything but the last straw after watching first Silesia and then East Prussia slip out of his hands.

The most Amalie could hope for was that Heinrich achieved peace quickly. He'd promised her he meant to open negotiations as soon as possible. If there had to be someone to replace Friedrich's firm and unquestioned hand on the tiller, she was glad it was Heinrich, whom Friedrich had sometimes called his other self.

The three siblings, Amalie, Heinrich, and Ferdinand, entered the Oranienburg church together. The plain wooden coffin lay where Amalie had left it the last time she was here. 

As they caught sight of it and moved to pay their private respects, before the removal ceremony began, Heinrich met Amalie's eyes.

"You're the abbess," he reminded her softly, with an ironic quirk. "What shall our text be?"

Amalie's own mouth twisted to match his. She grasped the gallows humor immediately, for being abbess was no more than a source of income for her, but for once her normally quick tongue was at a loss. She could quote chapter and verse as well as any child of Friedrich Wilhelm, but religion for comfort? That had never been part of her life or Heinrich's, as children or as adults. She'd always envied Wilhelm that he could find any such comfort.

Heinrich pressed her hand in his, understanding without words, and then turned toward the coffin. He gazed at it, walked around it, touched it, asked a couple of questions too quietly for Amalie to hear, and then, suddenly, gave the order for it to be opened. "I want to see his face one last time."

While the lid was raised, Amalie averted her eyes. Wilhelm's face was the last thing she wanted to see. She prayed she'd one day be able to get the sight of it out of her mind, twisted into agonized contortions for a full day and night, until death finally came as a release. Heinrich was fortunate not to have witnessed that.

Instead, she watched her living brothers. She noted Ferdinand's obvious grief, but also his concern, as his eyes kept darting from the coffin to Heinrich. Heinrich had eyes only for the dead. With the intensity blazing in every line of his body, he could have been ready to crawl in beside Wilhelm, or ready to set the world on fire.

He was still blazing when he reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and hard, then reached to put it in with his brother. He tucked it into the pocket of Wilhelm's coat, then ordered the coffin sealed again. After a moment, the glimpse of blue that Amalie's eye had caught resolved itself in her memory into a Meissen snuffbox, one of the spoils of war Heinrich had brought back from Saxony. So Heinrich wanted to leave his brother with one last gift, something he'd carried on his body for a year.

Then the tears pricking at Amalie's eyes swelled into a flood, and she could see no more.


	2. Chapter 2

"You let her travel in this state?!" Amalie screeched at the sight of her oldest sister, newly arrived in Berlin. The Margravine Wilhelmine was slumped back in a chair, with her daughter, Friederike, standing next to her.

Amalie had known that Wilhelmine was so sick her life was feared for, but her appearance exceeded Amalie's worst nightmares. Every part of her body was either painfully thin or swollen with dropsy. Her face was scarcely recognizable.

Amalie turned on Friederike with a furious glare. If the Margrave valued his own skin, he'd better have stayed in Bayreuth, but that wasn't going to get him out of hearing from Amalie. Letting his wife risk her life like this! Friederike only shrugged helplessly, looking defeated.

"I am my father's daughter," Wilhelmine said with a startling vehemence. The glint in her eyes was terrible to behold. For a moment, there was indeed something of the Soldier King about her, something that didn't look as out of place in this gracious and graceful sister as Amalie would have expected. In that moment, Amalie understood that Wilhelmine's daughter and husband had had no choice.

Then Wilhelmine doubled over, coughing helplessly into a handkerchief with both her hands.

The spell broke. Amalie no longer saw any traces of the Soldier King, only a frail sister who had no business being out of bed. "That's it," Amalie thundered. "Inside with you!" She'd lost the battle for Wilhelm and never had a chance to wage one for Friedrich, but she wasn't about to let Wilhelmine go easily.

In a nightmare of déjà vu, Amalie drove the patient, doctors, and staff as hard as if her own life were riding on it, trying to fend off the memories of Wilhelm willing himself to death in front of her very eyes. 

At least Wilhelmine was cooperative. She swallowed her medication, let herself be bled, and ate and slept when she was supposed to. It was some time before Amalie had a chance to sit down with her and find out why she'd taken the risk of coming all the way from Bayreuth. 

She couldn't have meant to come for the funeral; Friedrich's body was long laid in Sanssouci, next to a few of his favorite greyhounds, like good old Biche. But whatever had brought Wilhelmine here, it was hard to imagine it didn't have something to do with Friedrich. The two of them had been so close as children they could hardly tell where one left off and the other began. Even afterward, when the invisible cords tying them together were drawn taut by time and distance, they never snapped.

The strength of those cords had been underscored by a poem found among Friedrich's effects after his death. The first lines entreated the gods to take him and spare Wilhelmine, but acknowledged that that might be too much to ask. So he had asked that they let him and his sister die on the same day and be buried in the same grave, their dust intermingling. Amalie had keened in pain, reading the verses.

The poem had helped her make sense of why Friedrich had been so quick to end his life after the war took a turn for the worse and Wilhelm died unexpectedly: he was hoping not to have to outlive the sister he loved more than anyone. With his lover Fredersdorf gone only a few weeks before, the whole world must have felt like it was collapsing around him.

Now she wondered: was that why Wilhelmine had come? To be buried with him? If so, she hadn't reckoned with her youngest sister. Amalie's blood was up, and she was, in her own way, as much a fighter as any of her brother's generals.

Two days after Wilhelmine's arrival, Amalie sent the servants away so she could scold her sister in peace.

"You didn't even tell me you were coming to visit!" Due to the age difference, Wilhelmine had been married and living in Bayreuth before Amalie was old enough to have a real relationship with her. Still, they were sisters, and this year, only three months in, was already the worst of Amalie's life.

"I did," Wilhelmine protested. "The letter must have gone astray."

"Oh, imagine that, a letter going astray on its way through a _war zone_." Amalie loaded the last two words with all the not inconsiderable sarcasm she was capable of. "And yet you pick up and set out like it's nothing.

"Three funerals in the last year," she scolded, "two in as many months, and now you want to bring yours on? I'm going to be wearing black for the rest of my life."

She relented when she saw Wilhelmine was weeping.

"Friedrich was--he was-"

_Was your heart and soul, I know._

Amalie might have been the one who saw the most of him in the past twenty years, but she could only imagine the pain and terror that Friedrich and Wilhelmine had survived together as children, alone in the dark, holding hands and mocking the world.

"Was murdered," Wilhelmine finally got out.

Amalie just stared at her. Then she raised her hand and put it to her sister's forehead.

"I am not delirious! I wouldn't have come all the way to Berlin in this condition if I thought he'd killed himself. I would have followed him into the grave. Why drag out a few more months of pain and grief? I can't even play my lute." She held up her swollen fingers for display.

"All right, you're not delirious," Amalie said carefully. Why couldn't the universe give her a break for one minute? If it wasn't a dying sibling, it was a delusional one. "But perhaps you need some time to come to terms with the fact that he was capable of taking poison if things got bad enough."

Wilhelmine shook her head, hard, in frustration. "I know he was capable of it! He wrote me a letter last year, after he lost the battle of Kolin, to the effect that if I wanted to put an end to it all, he was ready to join me. I spent months talking him out of it, and Voltaire broke a five-year silence and set aside his resentment to join forces with me."

"Then why-"

"Because it worked! He pulled himself together, he was ready to go on fighting for his country. He wouldn't have killed himself over Wilhelm's death. It was a regrettable misunderstanding. It would have blown over with time."

A regrettable misunderstanding. That was one way of putting it. But Amalie wasn't going to start an argument over Friedrich's relentless refusal to give Wilhelm a second chance, not when her ailing sister was here making outlandish claims. She crossed her arms. "Suppose you're right, that the King was intending to forgive him eventually. I'm sure he was. But that would only make it more devastating when he realized it was too late."

"Realized, nothing. Here. This is what he had to say after Wilhelm's death." Wilhelmine pulled a letter out of her pocket and handed it to her sister. Then she leaned back against her pillows, exhausted, and wiped her streaming eyes.

Head whirling, Amalie read the letter. Then reread it. "It is odd," she had to admit. With Silesia and East Prussia under enemy occupation, Wilhelm's unexpected death, and all eyes on Friedrich, who'd been talking suicide for half a year...Amalie had told herself that it would only have taken one bleak midnight hour for him to make a decision that there was no coming back from.

And yet if the person who was arguably closest to him was confident that there was no way, and she was armed with this letter... It was a pity that Fredersdorf wasn't available for comment. He had been Friedrich's right hand for decades. But Amalie knew Friedrich as well as most, and he was a fighter. That was unquestionable.

Her eyes scanned the letter a third time.

"'An effect of his temper, of which he was not always the master,'" she read aloud. She had to agree, these were not the words of a man who couldn't live with what he'd done.

But were both of them grasping at any straws they could find to convince themselves Friedrich hadn't been in the depths of despair? At any rate, Amalie knew she could tell no one of Wilhelmine's terrible suspicions, not until she was sure. This family had been through enough.

Wilhelmine put a hand on Amalie's arm, and when Amalie raised her eyes from the letter, she saw again that chilling intensity she had seen earlier. Emphasizing each word, Wilhelmine said, "Friedrich couldn't let go. In the mindset he was in when he died, he was convinced he was the only one with a shot at winning a four-front war, and that his life belonged to Prussia and to the House of Brandenburg, not to himself."

"Heinrich's offered to give Silesia back to the Austrians," Amalie informed her.

"Exactly." 

Friedrich had announced his intentions of joining battle again, despite all the odds. So maybe Wilhelmine was right: his death hadn't been by his own hand. 

"I have to see justice done," Wilhelmine said. The intensity faded from her face, and she was again only a very ill, very exhausted woman. "And then…"

Their eyes met.

"I'm sorry, sister, I really am."

* * *

At first, when the initial shock of Friedrich's death had faded to something they would get used to in time, Prussia was hopeful for a peace. Maria Theresia wanted Silesia back, Heinrich believed Friedrich had had no right to conquer it in the first place, and it shouldn't have been all that difficult to come to terms with Austria.

But as winter turned into spring, the hopes placed on the negotiations began to founder. East Prussia was still under Russian occupation. Austria refused to leave the war before Prussia paid crippling indemnities and surrendered territory in return for the illegitimate seizing of Silesia twenty years ago and for the ongoing occupation of Saxony. And no European power would recognize Friedrich Wilhelm II, Wilhelm's son and Friedrich's nephew, as a king without East Prussia, the source of the Hohenzollerns' claim to a royal title. "Margrave and Prince Elector of Brandenburg," their enemies and even their Hanoverian allies would all write with vindictive glee.

So that was the one piece of territory they couldn't afford to surrender. And if Prussia had to give up occupied Saxony and pay the demanded indemnities on top of that, they could hardly fight their remaining enemies.

When the campaigning season opened, it was with Heinrich at the head of the Prussian army.

"Oh, no!" Wilhelmine cried when Amalie came to her to tell her the news. "Another year of war?" She and Voltaire had worked so hard to try to bring peace between Prussia and France, at least, in hopes of encouraging other nations to follow suit.

Amalie frowned. She wasn't sure it had been a good idea to tell Wilhelmine. Her older sister had been confined to her bed or chair since her arrival, and despite doctors and bloodletting, still looked like death warmed over. But Wilhelmine would have found out sooner or later, and at least Amalie could break it to her gently. 

"Without trying to hold Silesia, it should be possible to bring the war to a conclusion soon," Amalie tried to comfort her. Of course, they told themselves that every year. This would be year three. "By the way, Ferdinand's going with him." Then, because Wilhelmine had been partially out of the loop in Bayreuth, she added, "You know, Ferdinand, who was conveniently sick the entire time Wilhelm was in disgrace, and who's made a miraculous recovery now that his other brother's in command, the one he isn't worried will publicly humiliate him--twice."

Amalie had mixed feelings about Ferdinand's suspiciously-timed return to health. Of course she was glad that Ferdinand and Heinrich weren't looking over their shoulders any more, but it felt like an implicit statement of relief that Friedrich was dead, and she could not get behind that at all. And of course, now she had to worry about Ferdinand being shot in some battle.

Wilhelmine just shook her head and said sharply, "They would have forgiven each other."

Forgiveness of "each other" wasn't the point, but suppressing a sigh, Amalie forced herself to let it go. "I'm sure they would have."

Wilhelmine narrowed her eyes, but after a second exhaled and changed the subject. "Have you been able to find out anything about Friedrich's death? I cannot, will not believe he killed himself when he did. He might not have achieved all his objectives at Leuthen, but he was still standing at the end of the day, and Rossbach was a great victory just a month before. The tide was starting to turn."

The strategic failure of Leuthen might have been more serious than Wilhelmine would admit, Amalie thought, but she let that go as well in favor of answering the question. "I did talk to his reader," Amalie told her.

"The Abbé de Prades?" Wilhelmine looked confused. "I thought he'd been locked up."

"No, the new one. A Monsieur de Catt. For _some_ reason," her voice grew sardonic, "Heinrich didn't want to keep him on, so he's in Berlin until it's safe for him to return home."

"You mean he wasn't good-looking enough," Wilhelmine quipped.

Amalie burst out in surprised laughter. "I meant I don't know how Friedrich put up with him; he was getting under my skin in just the few minutes I talked to him. But now that you mention it, Heinrich was in a suspicious hurry to pounce on that tall and delicious-looking valet, what's his name, Glasow, that Friedrich hired a couple years ago.

"To be fair," she added wryly, "I may be disgruntled because he got a couple musicians I wanted. But your point stands: our Heinrich has a type, and that type is tall, handsome, and a bit of a bad boy. Catt's none of those things."

Wilhelmine laughed, and midway through, the laugh turned into a cough.

Quickly, Amalie looked at her sister with concern, but Wilhelmine gestured at her to continue. "Well, what Catt reported was...curious. He told me that the King had shown him a small golden box that he wore concealed on a ribbon around his neck and informed him that he kept a fatal dose of opium inside, in case he wanted to take the Stoic way out. He'd asked Catt to keep it a secret, because he didn't want even the servants knowing, lest they take it away. Catt was _devastated_ , just absolutely torn up, over having been the only one who knew the King was in danger and not having saved him."

Amalie couldn't fault his uncontrolled weeping, nor even suspect it of being feigned, but something about him had still rubbed her wrong. To grieve Friedrich after knowing him for a few months was to be expected, but Catt had acted as if the King's death had been all about him, as though he had as much right as Amalie to consider himself the bereaved.

"I also talked to the King's favorite page, Carl von Pirch-"

"Is that the one he used to call Carel?" Wilhelmine asked.

"The very same. He confirmed parts of Catt's story and contradicted others. They both agreed on the golden box hidden under his shirt, and Pirch described it as oval, containing eighteen pills of opium. It was clear he'd seen it more often than Catt. He said that everyone knew the King carried poison in case of capture."

Amalie laughed shortly. "I'll tell you this: I don't think our brother was so taken with this Catt that he was confiding secrets immediately after they met."

"Not Fritz," Wilhelmine murmured in agreement. 

At most, it was a test to see if Catt could be trusted. That would be far more in character for their brother, who'd grown ever more suspicious with age and the burdens of kingship.

Wilhelmine frowned. "But Monsieur de Catt said that he knew that the King was torn up enough after Wilhelm's death to go through with it?"

"No," Amalie said slowly. "That's the thing, you see. When I questioned him closely, I gathered that Friedrich seemed very focused on the war, and that while Catt knew in the abstract that he was considering suicide if things got bad enough...there were no major military reverses while the armies were in winter quarters, and the diplomatic scene was stable. Even after Wilhelm's death, Friedrich grieved, and it was clear he hadn't seen it coming, but he continued sending for Catt, and they were reading verse and drama together like always. Catt said he had no reason to believe Friedrich was in any particular danger that night, or else he would never have left his side, would have begged him on bended knee to live for his country and the people who loved him."

"So it's possible," said Wilhelmine quietly.

"It is," Amalie agreed reluctantly. "I tried to get access to the archival material surrounding the circumstances of Friedrich's death, but I was refused. If Heinrich were here, I would ask him, but it's difficult to explain in a letter. And I don't want anyone else knowing we suspect murder, until we have some kind of proof. But I'm doing what I can," she defended, seeing Wilhelmine's frown.

"I know you are. I just need to know what happened."

"So do I. Don't fear, I'll keep investigating," Amalie promised. This search had started at Wilhelmine's behest, but it was no longer about placating her, nor about what they might or might not want to be true. Now Amalie needed to _know_.

"But tell me what you think of the contradictions in Catt's story," she said to Wilhelmine. "Do they make it more or less likely that he was the one?"

They considered it for a while. On the one hand, it was one thing to dislike a man, another to accuse him of murder just because he was irritatingly self-important. On the other hand, there was the fact that Friedrich had met him while traveling incognito in the Netherlands a couple of years ago, and so not only was he a foreigner with few credentials, he was a recent arrival in Prussia. A spy? Years had passed between when Friedrich made him an offer to become his reader and when he accepted, and in that time, a war had started. Perhaps someone had a vested interest in stopping the war.

In Catt's favor was his claim that he didn't have any reason to believe that Friedrich was imminently considering suicide. Surely if he were covering up a murder, he would have harped on every sign of despair Friedrich had shown in the days leading up to his death.

All of a sudden, the room went grey on Amalie, and Wilhelmine's voice became a meaningless buzz. Amalie tried to hide it, but she had to grasp onto the bedpost to steady herself until the dizzy spell passed. When she came to her senses again, it was to the sight of fear on her sister's face.

"Amalie," Wilhelmine said, and a hint of sternness crept into her voice, "you don't look at all well. Are you taking care of yourself?"

"No!" she exploded. "When would I have time to do that? I have dying siblings, dead siblings, siblings to comfort, siblings to try to keep alive, representational duties, a war that's killing my finances, and I'm meant to try to keep morale up and convince everyone left in Berlin that the royal women are present because the war's going our way, and even when we have to evacuate, it's still going our way. What am I supposed to do, travel through a war zone to visit a spa? On what funds?"

"Still." Wilhelmine patted the edge of her bed, and after a moment, Amalie sat down. "If the only people you'll take care of are everyone in the world except yourself, then let me assure you that it won't do me a bit of good to have to worry about you. There must be some way of diverting yourself in Berlin that will be restful. We can all spare you for a little while. I mean it."

"Yes, Mama." Amalie made a face, half mocking, half affectionate. She was slightly indignant at being handled, but she had to admit the idea was tempting. "Tired" didn't begin to describe how she felt; she was beyond tired, and the more she drove herself, the more she dreamed of curling up in bed, sobbing into a pillow, and begging someone to take care of _her_. Somehow, Wilhelmine had seen that, even from her sickbed.

* * *

With summer beginning, Amalie allowed herself to be coaxed into taking an outdoor excursion in lieu of a spa visit. "A day only for yourself," Wilhelmine insisted. "See the trees and flowers blooming, breathe fresh air, stop hovering over sickbeds. I'll still be here tomorrow."

It didn't take much convincing. The days when Amalie and her brothers and their mother would drive out to the country, often at Wilhelm's Oranienburg, were over, but Berlin's Tiergarten was vast, nearby, and offered many diversions. One sunny day with no prospect of rain, she made arrangements to take her children out with her for a romp. Though she had no children of her body, she made a practice of adopting street urchins in need, and seeing to their clothes, food, and education. Today, delighted to have the afternoon free of lessons, they hastened with Amalie and her favorite ladies-in-waiting to the park.

Amalie was a favorite with the children on these occasions, because she didn't mind if her skirts got muddy, or a small body bumped into hers in the middle of a rousing game of tag. She inspected all worms, frogs, and butterflies brought to her with enough interest to satisfy even the most enthusiastic child, and once she'd even dissected a bird and given an impromptu lesson on anatomy before awed eyes.

Today, after a long winter with too much time spent cooped up inside, everyone ran wild. The children, at least. Now a lady, Amalie had to walk more sedately and carry a parasol, but she watched her little ones spar with long branches, and she called out advice and warnings to boys and girls alike.

"No, not the face, go for the chest. No one's losing an eye today. That's right, get 'im hard! With the flat only. That's my girl."

The weather, the shouts, and the running all reminded her of being six or seven years old, and storming faux battlements together with Wilhelm and Heinrich, as the officers in charge of the princes' education looked on and gave instruction. She had loved it, and most of all she and Heinrich had loved how Wilhelm wanted them as companions, even when their shorter legs couldn't keep up. One of the saddest days had come when she was informed by her governess that she was too old to play that game.

"You can do it, Georg!" she shouted at a boy trying to pull himself up into a tree, and she glared at a passerby who gave her a startled glance. She would yell if she wanted to.

Then she felt a little hand sliding inside hers. It was Elise, a girl who'd been grateful just to have an inside within which to be cooped up this past winter. "Aunt Amalie? There's a strawberry vendor just over there."

"No, no, I'm afraid that's not in the budget. I know, Ulli," she said to a boy who'd run over to enthusiastically second the appeal, "but that was before the war." Looking at all the black and white faces now turning toward her with pleading expressions, she had to fight off an inner chill, despite the heat. Somehow, she had to find a way to keep not only her staff, but also her children fed and clothed, while supplies became harder to find and money had to stretch farther with each passing month.

"But Aunt Wilhelmine said you're supposed to take care of yourself today so you don't get sick," Elise argued cunningly. "I'm sure she'd want you to buy the strawberries."

Amalie gazed at the girl in disbelief. "But how do you know that? And since when is she 'Aunt'?" Then she couldn't help laughing out loud. "Very well, yes, you have quite the powers of persuasion. I can see I'll have to watch out for you when you're older. Strawberries for everyone, then. We'll make the budget work. Somehow," she groaned under her breath.

While eating her share, Amalie had to admit Wilhelmine had been onto something. It was restful just to do something different, something that had no purpose, and to remember that despite all the deaths, the sun shone and children grew.

Not far away, a woman in widow's garb stopped on one of the paths and began regarding her very carefully, as if to be sure she really was the Princess Amalie. Amalie sighed. There were more and more widows these days. Carefully avoiding eye contact, Amalie turned to the lady-in-waiting beside her and said, sotto voce, "If she starts to approach, tell her I'm very sorry, but I have no influence on soldiers' pensions."

"But that is Fredersdorf's widow, madam," she was informed with some surprise. "I doubt very much she'd be here to petition for that."

"Oh, is it?" Amalie allowed herself to examine the woman more closely. Her eyes weren't good enough to make out the other woman's face from this distance, but the rich black gown obviously belonged to a lady of quality. With a smile and a nod, Amalie invited the woman to approach her. They'd met at court a few times, and Amalie had nothing against her, even if her late husband's constant interfering in everything had given Amalie cause to resent him more than once.

They exchanged polite condolences, and then Frau Fredersdorf got down to business. "I have in my possession my husband's correspondence with the late King, and I don't know what to do with it. His Majesty had asked for it after Herr Fredersdorf's death, but then he died himself so soon afterward, before I'd even received his letter. Now that the new king is a minor and the princes are away at war, I'm not certain where I should send the letters, or if no one cares any more and I should keep them. I'm sorry to bother you. I rather thought that King Friedrich wouldn't want the dowager queen to have his correspondence, but if you think-"

"No, he wouldn't." That was one thing Amalie was sure of. Friedrich had always kept himself and his private life as far away from his wife as possible. "You can have them sent to me at the palace. I'll see that they make it safely to the Regent Heinrich."

Frau Fredersdorf curtsied. "I'm forever grateful to you, Your Highness."

Up to this point, Amalie had been acting out of a sense of duty. Belatedly, it occurred to her that Friedrich might have revealed something to his closest confidant that might bear on his readiness to take poison. "Please do make sure to include any copies your husband made of letters he sent to the King," she added, "not only the letters the King sent to him. The Regent will need those for context."

"Oh? Yes, madam," Frau Fredersdorf said agreeably, despite her surprise. "Of course."

They made inconsequential chat about the court, and finally Frau Fredersdorf asked the other question that was on her mind. "I don't mean to inquire about military secrets," she said in a low voice, "but is there any chance of another raid on Berlin? I promise not to panic or spread the word, I only want to know if I should prepare for an evacuation. I always like to plan ahead when I can."

"Oh, not at all," Amalie said in her princess voice. "Prince Heinrich has the situation well in hand." It was partly the obligatory response to any such question, and partly a genuine belief in Heinrich.

 _Storming real battlements now_ , she thought. _Storm well, brother._

* * *

Though the war raged on, Heinrich did not abandon the diplomatic angle. He tried subtly hinting to the enemy powers that the conquest of Silesia and occupation of Saxony had all been a terrible mistake made by a man now dead, and that his heirs should not be held responsible for indemnities if they were willing to be more reasonable.

A number of factors tied his hands. One, if heirs couldn't be held responsible for the decisions of their predecessors, no trust in any international treaty could be maintained, or so the Empress and her ministers argued. Two, as they never tired of reminding Heinrich, he had been active in the war from the beginning, even held his own command, and an effective one at that. The Austrians and French allowed that he had been notable for treating defeated enemies with respect, and he insisted he had never wanted the war, but he could hardly claim to have been a conscientious objector. 

Finally, there was a limit to how much Heinrich could criticize Friedrich in public. Their personal differences notwithstanding, he'd taken up Friedrich's mantle, and the late king was a hero the likes of which had never been known in Prussia. The ambiguous circumstances of his death meant that everyone could choose for him or herself what factor had been decisive in his suicide. Either he had died like a Roman after a military setback, or else he had died of grief for his brother and his dying sister, in a way that even those who condemned suicide could find it in themselves to pity.

Either way, Heinrich could only undermine his own position by condemning the great Friedrich. Instead, he was supposed to fight the great man's war against the great man's enemies, without ever complaining.

"Oh, he complains," Amalie said to Wilhelmine, settling in beside her one afternoon with a large basket of papers. "To Ferdinand, to me, to that adjutant of his and the new valet, neither of whom are very discreet...he just can't complain too much in the political arena. And so, here we are. Still at war."

Wilhelmine sighed. When Friedrich had died, so had her negotiation efforts. She had no special influence with Heinrich, and his own attempts to work out a peace weren't proving any more fruitful than hers had. She'd turned her hopes instead toward an endeavor she had been successful with in the past: writing an opera libretto. If Providence granted her wish to learn the story of her brother's death, she would turn it into art. She would send a copy of her libretto to Voltaire, and perhaps he would be moved to make it the subject of one of his immortal plays. Then she would know that the curse of a life long enough to witness her brother's death had not been entirely the whim of a cruel universe, but a sacrifice she was asked to make for him. That, she could live with.

Her bleak thoughts were interrupted by Alceme hopping up onto the footstool, right as Amalie was attempting to rest her feet on it. Wilhelmine caught a look of irritation, but to her credit, Amalie replaced her feet on the floor without a word.

"Put her up here with me?" Wilhelmine suggested. "Sometimes I think she likes me mostly because the servants always put my chair in the sunlight. When I'm in bed, like as not she's by the window!"

Involuntarily, Amalie laughed in the middle of bending over and picking up the greyhound. "That's dogs for you."

"No, she's a sweet, loyal creature," Wilhelmine crooned, arranging her skirt and blankets into a nest. Her legs were so swollen that she could hardly bear the full weight of a dog on her lap, but she'd trained Alcmene to lie down beside her, and Alcmene had trained her to make it a comfortable spot. The greyhound turned around twice on the loveseat and settled down next to Wilhelmine. "I wrong her. She loves me even on rainy days." Her hand stroked the back of Alcmene's neck. Then her voice became pensive. "She was with him, you know, when he died. They found her in bed next to him."

"Was she? I didn't know that." Amalie reached over then and gave her head a light pat. "Good dog. Good for you. And now he's next to Biche and the others."

"She could tell us everything, if only she could talk. Couldn't you, Alcmene?"

Recognizing her name, Alcmene raised her head and looked into Wilhelmine's eyes with such an intelligent expression that even Amalie paused and regarded her, as if…

Then, at the same time, both sisters uttered short, tense laughs at their folly.

"What have you got there?" Wilhelmine glanced at Amalie's basket, wanting to change the subject.

"This," Amalie said proudly, "this might be the key to our great question. These are the letters Friedrich and Fredersdorf exchanged, courtesy of the latter's widow. I've agreed to store them until Heinrich has time for them."

"But Heinrich's at the front, so in the meantime you're reading them?" Wilhelmine asked with a hint of reproach.

"I'm keeping them safe."

"You don't think that Friedrich wanted these letters destroyed?" Wilhelmine prodded.

"I don't know what he wanted," Amalie returned, unperturbed, "I just know that I have them in my possession now. Heinrich can do what he likes with them after I've had a chance to figure out if my brother was killed. And you didn't let me get to the best part: I even managed to bribe a servant to get the rest of Fredersdorf's political papers included with the delivery. It looks like he was cautious enough to destroy most of them before he died-"

"I would expect no less of him."

"I agree, but check this out. In addition to his letters to our brother, many of which are quite personal, there are a few interesting items." Amalie handed her stash over.

Obligingly, Wilhelmine started skimming the pile. Fredersdorf was consistently deferential with occasional glimmers of affection showing through, Friedrich alternately tender, teasing, and worried, tones she knew all too well.

_I want to see you tomorrow. Come to your window at noon when I ride by, but keep it closed and make sure the fire is warm._

The words swam before her eyes. How much she'd feared she would be replaced in Friedrich's love by his wife, and all this time it was the quiet, omnipresent Fredersdorf who was her true rival. Little wonder Friedrich wanted the letters back.

Should she be glad her brother had had a loyal servant-confidant-right hand after she left, or be as jealous as she'd once been of Friedrich's new bride? It shouldn't matter; Friedrich and Fredersdorf were dust, and soon Wilhelmine would be as well.

Her hands, holding the piece of paper, fell weakly to her lap. "I can't. Just tell me." She was sitting by a window, and it was overwhelming to think that she would never see Friedrich ride by it. He would never send her medicine, never urge her to be careful of her health, never worry about her again.

Amalie looked annoyed at the anticlimactic reception of her great discovery, but she saw the tears in Wilhelmine's eyes and softened. "The first finding is that Fredersdorf wanted Glasow dismissed. Friedrich replied he would listen to any evidence Fredersdorf had that Glasow was a traitor, but Fredersdorf had to admit all he had was a bad feeling. Friedrich seemed genuinely touched by Fredersdorf's concern and told him not to worry, that it was only as valet that he'd been replaced, and that was only because of bad health. He promised that Glasow wouldn't have access to anything important, and that Fredersdorf retained all his sensitive offices: treasurer, spymaster, and so on."

"And then Fredersdorf stepped down," Wilhelmine remembered. "Remind me when?"

"April of last year. He died this January. If you ask me," she said with a mixture of disapproval and respect, "he should have stepped down sooner, but he kept on working until he physically couldn't any more." 

"Judging by the letters I saw," Wilhelmine said, "he didn't think the King could do without him."

She thought she had kept her voice free of any jealousy or discontent, but perhaps she hadn't. Amalie gave her a penetrating look. "Judging by Friedrich either committing suicide or being poisoned a few months later, he had a point."

Wilhelmine took a deep breath. "Do you think Glasow…"

Amalie looked rather proud of herself. "Well. That's where the rest of Fredersdorf's papers come in. He has a number of bills paid for out of the royal purse that appear to be for Glasow's personal use, as well as evidence he was selling the use of his seal to anyone who paid enough."

"Friedrich allowed a new valet to withdraw money from the royal purse?" Wilhelmine blinked.

"No," said Amalie with a hint of impatience, "Glasow had a forged copy of Fredersdorf's signet ring."

"How on earth did Glasow get that? And why didn't Fredersdorf submit the evidence?"

Amalie shook her head. "Both good questions, to which I don't have answers. Maybe Fredersdorf didn't have an airtight case against Glasow and was waiting until he did, and then he got too sick to finish."

"Or maybe," said Wilhelmine slowly, "Fredersdorf was forging the evidence to frame Glasow, and couldn't bring himself to follow through."

Amalie stared at her.

"I've done it. Not, admittedly, to implicate someone else, but to exonerate myself. In 1730," she added, to Amalie's look. The year of Friedrich's failed escape attempt. "It was that or-" She wasn't sure what, but worse than the beatings, eight months of confinement to her rooms, and forced marriage she'd been lucky to get away with.

Amalie still looked skeptical. "And you think Fredersdorf was capable of that?"

"I didn't know him very well," said Wilhelmine. Clearly she hadn't known him at all, if only now was she finding out what the man had meant to her brother. But she still wanted to be fair to him. "What I know is that if he thought Friedrich was in danger, he'd count his own life well lost if it meant protecting his king. And with one foot in the grave, he didn't have all that much to lose if he was caught."

"Hmmph. Maybe." Amalie shook her head. "But I still think Friedrich would have listened to him if he'd had anything beyond a bad feeling. The trust between those two was…considerable."

"Then maybe this is all genuine and he wasn't able to finish making his case before he died. What we know for sure is that he was suspicious of Glasow and had assembled some evidence. And, in that case, we should see if Heinrich is any more willing to listen."

"I'll submit all this to him, but Heinrich seems even more taken with the hot young thing than Friedrich was," Amalie warned. "It's obvious they're sleeping together."

"Then let's hope Fredersdorf is more persuasive dead than alive."

* * *

Another regular visitor in Wilhelmine's sickroom was her sister-in-law of the same name, Wilhelmine of Hesse-Kassel, called Mina. Wilhelmine appreciated very much that her family wasn't letting her wither in boredom or loneliness, even when she was too sick and weak to leave her rooms. There was always music when Wilhelmine wanted it, and sympathetic company.

Mina herself had had a good education, and in addition to being able to play for Wilhelmine, she could talk to her about history and literature, and her French was very elegant. Little wonder Wilhelmine's mother had immediately pronounced Mina her favorite daughter.

But Wilhelmine couldn't hold that against her; after all, Friedrich had been their mother's favorite child, hands down.

So Mina came almost as often as Amalie, and talking to her, if not exactly a comfort, was at least a distraction from wracking grief. Sometimes the conversation flowed, and the grief abated, and other times, Wilhelmine had to fight hard to hide her feelings.

Today was one of the hard days. As Mina kept up a steady chatter about the books she was reading and the accomplishments of Wilhelm's seven-year-old daughter, Wilhelmine struggled to pay any attention. Her mind kept coming back to Friedrich, and how lonely the world was without him in it.

Thoughts of Friedrich's absence flowed naturally into thoughts of the opera libretto she was writing about his fall, the only means she sometimes had of making the pain bearable. She had chosen her hero: Amon, who was slain by his servants in the second Book of Kings. The Biblical account was very brief, which suited her purposes; it left her free to imagine the characters as she wished. And although Amon was portrayed as a wicked king in the Bible because he refused to compel his subjects to worship the Hebrew God alone, and instead embraced other gods as well, why not, in a modern opera, make him a symbol of enlightened kingship and religious tolerance, a hero precisely because he wasn't in thrall to irrational superstition?

Some of the sketches of Amon and a couple of the other characters were already half-finished, but she couldn't yet move forward with the plot. She was stalled until she could find out more about Friedrich's death: who, why, and how?

Noticing Wilhelmine's divided attention, Mina gracefully rose to take her leave. As always before she left, she asked if there was anything she could do to make Wilhelmine more comfortable. Usually Wilhelmine demurred, but this time she hesitated.

"If it's not too much trouble...there is one thing."

"You have only to name it," Mina assured her.

"Would you be able to let me see the materials in the archives relating to my brother's-" She choked. "Suicide?"

Dismayed, Mina looked as if that had been the last thing she expected. "I can't believe that would do you any good. You need to rest and take your mind off your sufferings. All your family wants nothing more than for you to recover."

"This would do me good," Wilhelmine lied. Well, it was a partial truth. If she could die in some kind of peace, knowing he'd been avenged, or even knowing for sure that he died by his own hand, that would be better than clinging to this half life. "It's the not knowing that keeps me imagining it over and over. Once I see the papers with my own eyes..."

"And the archivists won't let you see them?"

This was where she had to tread carefully. She didn't want to drag her sister-in-law into this mess, on the one hand, and on the other, she didn't want to endanger her work with Amalie by letting it become public prematurely. Luckily, if it could be called luck, her childhood had taught her to lie convincingly. "Probably they would, if I were to go in person. But I can't, and I can't authorize anyone else. You, though, are the wife of the Regent. Heinrich's at war and not likely to return soon, or I would ask him."

Mina hesitated, thinking it over. "Can you promise this won't lead to morbid fancies? I wouldn't want to be the one who hurt your chances of survival."

Wilhelmine laughed blackly, which she disguised without much trouble as a cough. She didn't need to commit suicide. Her body was doing that for her, and if Mina didn't see that there was no hope, then it was because she couldn't bring herself to admit it. "I'm fighting for every day of life I can get," she answered honestly. Without this cause to live for, she would be fading far more swiftly, she could feel it.

Slowly, Mina nodded. "His Majesty was good to me," she added. "He always treated me like a sister. I would never forgive myself if I let anything happen to his dearest family member."

"If there is anything more beyond the grave than memory and dust," Wilhelmine promised, "I'll tell him you were a sister to me as well." Mina looked blank, as she often did when Wilhelmine referred to her impending death. Then something occurred to Wilhelmine. "This isn't widely known, but he opened the material in the archives relating to his trial and Katte's execution as soon as he became king. Then he read them, sealed them up again, and moved on."

This time, Wilhelmine had hit upon the right note. Mina brightened. "Did he? I'll see what I can do, then. We all want you to be able to move on."

* * *

"Alcmene!" Friederike appeared suddenly at the door of Wilhelmine's room. She was visibly taken aback at the sight of the greyhound balancing athletically on the back of her mother's seat and tugging hairpins loose. "Bad dog! Come here."

She started toward them, but Wilhelmine, smiling, waved her off. "No, no. Let her stay. She's being gentle." With each hairpin that started to fall, Wilhelmine reached up and retrieved it before Alcmene could decide to swallow it. She was a smart dog, but one could never be too careful. "I didn't tell you she's my new lady's maid? Heinrich took Friedrich's valet, Amalie and Heinrich divided up the musicians, and I took the greyhounds."

It was a good day for Wilhelmine, the kind that was getting rarer and rarer. She'd woken up with a little more energy, and she was glad to be able to spend it with her daughter and the dogs.

Friederike laughed. "The Pompadours, you mean?" She sat down in a chair next to her mother, who was seated by the window. Diane was curled up on a cushion at their feet, gnawing a bone.

Wilhelmine laughed with her. With her hair now falling loose over her shoulders, she arranged her blanket on the seat, right up against her swollen left thigh, then clucked her tongue twice.

Abiding by their agreement, Alcmene hopped down onto the blanket, and then she made Wilhelmine chuckle by promptly rolling onto her back. Affectionately, Wilhelmine stroked the offered belly, comforting herself as much as the dog. Alcmene might not be a replacement for Wilhelmine's late and much lamented spaniel Folichon, but she was a link to Friedrich second to none. Her presence was a balm on raw grief, allowing it to recede enough for Wilhelmine to remember how important sharing laughter had always been to her and Friedrich, and what an important part dogs had played in that laughter.

Smiling at the tongue lolling ridiculously out of Alcmene's upside down mouth, Friederike reached over and took a paw lightly between her thumb and forefinger. She didn't share her mother's and uncle's passion for dogs, but she was fond of them.

"He called them Pompadours to mock Louis of France," Wilhelmine mused, "but they were more his children than his mistresses. Will you see that they're taken care of after I go? I don't want them merely fed and bathed. They should be petted and played with. But by someone who won't ruin their health with over-indulgence. Too many people gush over dogs without understanding them."

Friederike nodded. "Of course." Then she leaned her head against her mother's arm. "Please don't die." But Friederike said the words without hope, a sigh rather than a protest. They'd both been living with Wilhelmine's slow decline too long for there to be any denial left, even on one of her good days.

Wilhelmine breathed in, then out again slowly. She'd already lived too long, she told herself. Outlived her brother, and if this war went badly, she didn't want to outlive the House of Brandenburg. And yet--the body had a will of its own. It breathed, and it wanted to keep breathing. She put her hand on her daughter's and patted it silently.

Amalie found them like that. Sitting together in the afternoon sun, Alcmene asleep under their linked hands. Wilhelmine raised her head to greet Amalie, and was surprised to see an unguarded expression cross Amalie's face, as if she was longing for something she couldn't name. Amalie folded her lips, and in the blink of an eye the look was gone, replaced by affection and concern.

"I was thinking," she said to her sister, "I know you can't play, but I thought, if you like, I could have a harpsichord brought in, and I could play for you sometimes." She looked around the room. "We could make it fit."

"Dear Amalie." Wilhelmine smiled with the tenderness filling her. "I would love that." How like Amalie to think of it. They had played together, lute and harpsichord, the last time Wilhelmine had been in Berlin, and they had even talked about composing some pieces just for them. But time had passed, Wilhelmine had come down with the flu, the visit had flown by, and they had never found the time. "The drawers over there could be moved into my bedroom, that won't be a problem."

"I'll have it done, then." Amalie smiled back at her, a little tentatively.

The three of them chatted about times they had played together in the past, composers they loved, operas they had seen. "And Wilhelmine," Amalie said, "I was just looking over your opera libretti. Did I ever tell you how much I loved _Semiramis_?"

 _Semiramis_ , hmm? Wilhelmine kept her face straight, but that was the one in which the protagonist killed his mother. When Voltaire had sent her a copy of his play, she, the unwanted and despised daughter of her mother, hadn't been able to resist adapting it. So that was Amalie's favorite. 

"My mother," said Friederike with true partisanship and completely missing the subtext, "writes the best operas in Europe."

Wilhelmine laughed, a little self-consciously. "Hardly. But I do want to see if I can produce one more libretto before I die."

All three of them were used by now to Wilhelmine talking about her death matter-of-factly. Though they winced a bit, Amalie looked interested. "What about?"

"My brother's death."

"He died the death of a Roman." Friederike bowed her head respectfully, not needing to inquire about which brother. Meanwhile, Amalie looked intently at Wilhelmine, and Wilhelmine met her gaze unblinkingly.

Friederike caught their silent exchange, and without saying anything, politely excused herself soon after. Wilhelmine raised a questioning eyebrow once she was alone with her sister.

Amalie moved to occupy Friederike's seat. She hesitated before she spoke. "I--there's something I have to confess." When Wilhelmine gave her an encouraging nod, she forced the words out. "When Wilhelm died, I was the one who wrote to Friedrich. I gave him every detail, blow by blow, of how Wilhelm suffered in his last days and especially those last twenty-four hours. I was angry. Then I heard Friedrich had killed himself and left a note about how torn up he was about Wilhelm." Her voice was bleak. "I would very much like this not to be suicide."

"Oh, Amalie." Wilhelmine didn't know what to say. She loved Wilhelm, but she loved Friedrich more. She loved Friedrich, but she still loved Wilhelm. It was too much to ask anyone to choose between her brothers. "We were all grieved when the news came," she finally settled on. "And none of us died of grief: not Heinrich, not you and I, and not Friedrich. Wilhelm, too, would have died anyway."

Amalie looked reluctant to believe, but nodded slowly, wanting the absolution. 

"You're sure? The fact that no one saw it coming in the weeks leading up to Friedrich's death isn't decisive. Catt didn't know him all that well, and even Pirch...Friedrich had the strength of will to conceal his intentions, if he decided to go through with it."

"He did. But he had the strength of will to keep going," Wilhelmine said. "In the first shock of grief or defeat, yes, he might have done something drastic, which is why we were all worried after Kolin. But he always recovered. He nearly died after he had to watch Lieutenant Katte lose his head, but the preacher and doctors urged him to live for me and our mother. Then he took his medicine and began outwardly complying with our father's reform program for him, while reading forbidden books and smuggling me letters."

"Yes." Amalie was too young to remember in that much detail, but she knew the stories. Then: "Would you have?" she asked suddenly. "Would you have lived for our mother?"

Wilhelmine sighed. Her eyes turned toward the window, seeking solace in the blue sky and waving green branches as an old pain pierced her breast. "If she'd wanted me to. Sometimes I think I could have made her happier by not living. She said so often enough, when I disappointed her."

Amalie nodded, as if something she'd been thinking had just been confirmed.

"You lived with her the longest." Wilhelmine turned her gaze back toward her sister. "You knew her."

"She was the best of mothers: noble, solicitous, loving." Amalie's voice was so sarcastic it cracked like a whip. Wilhelmine flinched, imagining what it must have been like for her, living at home with only brothers and no sisters. The Queen Mother had adored and been adored by her oldest son, mostly benevolently ignored her other three sons, and honored her daughters by making them the targets of her frequent wrath. Amalie must have often been in the position of gritting her teeth while she was bombarded with her brothers' praise of their mother.

"She was to Friedrich," Wilhelmine defended her brother. "She was a proud woman, a great queen, and a tender mother to him. As to whether she cared anything about the rest of us except for the honor we could bring on the family by marrying well…"

"Oh, that must have been why I was her least favorite. I never married."

"Better than marrying the wrong person, trust me. You did reconcile before her death, didn't you?"

Amalie looked haunted. "Yes, but it was a near thing. We were barely speaking that last year, she refused to let me eat from the palace kitchens, and if she'd died abruptly during that period, that would have been it. As it is, we made peace near the end, but I still never had a real mother."

"I know what you mean. I had my governess." Sonsine was gone now, but Wilhelmine would cherish her memory until her own death.

"Well, we all had staff who raised us," Amalie snapped, "no one expected her to do that, but it remains the case that Friedrich had a mother and we didn't."

That wasn't quite what Wilhelmine had meant, but she wasn't going to quarrel. She sighed.

"I just hope my daughter remembers me better than we remember the Queen." When Friederike returned home from her unhappy marriage, Wilhelmine and her husband had done what they saw as their duty as parents and put pressure on her to go back, but she had never called her daughter the vomit of humanity simply because her marriage wasn't going according to her mother's plans. And when the second attempt at living together failed, Friederike came home for good and Wilhelmine accepted it.

Maybe she had done better. She could only hope.

"I know she will," Amalie assured her. 

Wilhelmine looked at her curiously. "How can you be so sure?"

Amalie just said, "I'm sure." Then she leaned her head against her older sister's arm, just where Friederike had. 

_Oh, Amalie._

Wilhelmine covered her hand with her own, just where she had Friederike's. Amalie twined their fingers together, careful of the dropsy, as tight as Wilhelmine could bear.


	3. Chapter 3

"Wilhelmine, Wilhelmine, we were right!"

Amalie, bursting into her sister's room, was shocked by the sight she saw there. Wilhelmine was so pale she was nearly translucent. The effort it took for her to open her eyes, raise them to Amalie, and give the ghost of a smile was so phenomenal it took Amalie's breath away.

She stopped in her tracks. "I can come back."

"No." Wilhelmine's voice was hardly more than a whisper. "Tell me."

Frozen where she stood, Amalie wavered. How could she break news like this to a woman who might be on her deathbed? She would have given the rough edge of her tongue to anyone who tried. But how could she not?

"Tell me."

Looking into those compelling eyes, Amalie was once again forcibly reminded of the Soldier King, and knew she would have to tell her. 

She sat down beside her sister on the bed, took her hand, and began to relate the most recent developments. She wondered, even as she was doing so, if she was giving Wilhelmine permission to die.

At the order of Prince Heinrich, Christian Friedrich Glasow had been locked in Spandau after evidence came to light that he'd betrayed the Prussians. At Leuthen, the great battle against the Austrians for Silesia at the end of the previous year, Friedrich had been maneuvering his army out of sight of the enemy, only someone had told them the night before what to expect. The Prussians had held the field at the end of the day and declared victory, but the Austrians, critically, had not been forced to evacuate Silesia and remained in possession of it.

After Glasow was imprisoned, the Regent, now showing himself to be an accomplished general in his own right, out of his brother's shadow, published an account of how the battle had been intended to go. Using topographical maps, he showed that the hills were such that they would have concealed the Prussian movements from the Austrians, who did not have scouts posted in the places they would have had to in order to know what it turned out they already knew. Leuthen was on Prussian training ground, where they'd executed maneuvers every autumn since the initial conquest, and Friedrich and his officers knew the terrain with their eyes closed.

"The Austrians aren't buying it," Amalie concluded. "Pure face-saving propaganda, they call it. I call it entertaining to see Heinrich defending Friedrich's military genius, after all those years of writing pamphlets about the mistakes he'd made and then celebrating when he lost the first, and only, battle of his career."

Wilhelmine just shook her head. "None of that matters. _Did Glasow kill my brother?_ "

Amalie felt like she'd had the wind knocked out of her.

"It's not the same thing," Wilhelmine pressed. She was struggling for breath between coughs. "Treason and regicide."

It took a second for Amalie to piece that together. Wilhelmine was saying that committing treason by selling military information wasn't the same thing as being willing to kill Friedrich. It wasn't, but--

"I don't think he's going to confess!" she exploded. "You want me to keep researching, then? You know, I was hoping to someday have a life that didn't revolve around the death, death," she began counting on her fingers, "death, oh, right, and the death of an immediate family member!"

As soon as she said it, Amalie could have bitten her tongue, but at the same time, the glass shards of grief and anger wouldn't stop cutting at her. With every blow the universe dealt her, she felt she had a choice: grow weaker or stronger. She refused point-blank to die of grief, so instead she kept putting on layer after layer of sarcasm, her armor against the world.

"I want you," Wilhelmine said, weak but implacable, "to find out who killed my brother, so I can die."

"Well, where do you want me to start? Glasow's locked in solitary confinement, with no visitors allowed, and I doubt even I'd be able to talk to him. Not if I couldn't even get access to the archives."

"Mina got access to the archives."

By this point, Amalie was almost used to getting bombshells from her oldest sister.

"Really?" Against her will, she was impressed. "How'd she manage that?"

Wilhelmine just lifted one shoulder, barely perceptibly. Then, with an effort, she rallied a bit. She pulled herself up a little, while Amalie hastened to put another pillow behind her. Then she reached under the red coverlet that was now enveloping her lap, and pulled out a piece of paper.

"Mina was wonderful. She couldn't remove the originals, but she copied everything for me. The suicide note--I didn't dare ask if it was in his handwriting, but she did tell me was that it was on a scrap of paper."

"And that's significant because?"

Wordlessly, Wilhelmine handed her the copy Mina had made. But Amalie only shook her head after reading it. _I am all the more crushed as I have always loved him tenderly_ , and the like. "It's what I was expecting to see: that he regretted what happened with Wilhelm. It's what his suicide note is supposed to have said, by all accounts. You mean he didn't explicitly admit fault in it? That's not a lot to go on."

Wilhelmine sighed, closed her eyes, and after gathering another burst of energy, said, "The letter that Friedrich wrote to me, when Wilhelm died. It's almost the same, verbatim. That part of it." Then she subsided into coughing again. Her huge, burning eyes silently willed Amalie to understand.

The gears turned in Amalie's mind as she walked through the implications. "You mean whoever it was took a draft of a real letter he wrote and tore off the parts that made it clear he blamed Wilhelm for the fallout, leaving only the parts where he praised Wilhelm's good traits and said he was grieving him?" The light dawned. "And that's how someone got a suicide note in his handwriting, yes. That would do it." Then enlightenment was replaced by blind fury. "The bastard! It better not have been Catt, it better have been Glasow. Rotting in Spandau in solitary confinement is too good for my brother's murderer. If Catt got away scot-free back to the Netherlands..."

"We still need proof," Wilhelmine cautioned her.

"Was that all that was in the archives?"

"No, there was more, but I haven't been able to finish reading it." Wilhelmine reached behind her neck and pulled out a key on a chain she'd been hiding under her bodice. She handed it to Amalie. Then she slid back down under the covers. "It's the box on the stool there. Let me know what you find."

Amalie accepted the key, but she didn't go straight to the box. Instead, she went to the spinet that had been installed in the next room. As penance for losing her temper earlier, she began to play. Softly, quietly, almost a lullaby, letting the sounds pour through the open door. She didn't leave until she saw Wilhelmine had fallen asleep.

* * *

Half resentful at the demands being made on her, half in awe of how much Wilhelmine had been able to accomplish while confined to her bed, Amalie reviewed the documents she'd been given. She would have appreciated the assistance of her sister's quick mind, but she could see Wilhelmine was only just holding onto life through the sheer stubborn power of her spirit. Her body was so clearly ready to go it was all but begging for release.

Amalie shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the image. Fresh in her memory was the reverse, when robust Wilhelm went overnight to basically willing himself to death. Maybe Wilhelmine was right, maybe his invisible brain condition would have carried him off eventually anyway, but the fact remained that his wounded spirit had dragged his body down with it in all haste. Now Wilhelmine was fighting like Friedrich's life depended on it.

So Amalie worked her way through the stack of papers, looking for clues.

The most promising document was the account of how Friedrich's death had been discovered. He had gone to bed a little early, but not suspiciously so, after his chocolate had been delivered and he'd sent away his dogs and his valet--

Amalie stopped reading then and skimmed the sheet to find out who the author was...oh, that was interesting. The account was written by Glasow, in the third person. Making a note of that, she returned to her spot and kept reading.

Glasow had removed the King's clothes before bed and left him alone in his room, as always. His own room was nearby, and he went to bed not imagining anything was amiss. Then in the morning, he realized he had slept late and not been woken. Gathering up the King's page, who said he hadn't been called and agreed that it was oddly late not to have heard from the King, they immediately went to see if he was sick. Glasow was the one who dared to enter first after not hearing any response to their knocking. He found Friedrich lying peacefully in bed, not breathing. He was cold as if he'd been dead a long time. 

Glasow and the page Pirch had called for the doctors at once, but despite all their frantic efforts, there was nothing that could be done. The note on Friedrich's always messy desk had only been found much later, because suicide had not been at the top of anyone's mind when a king often plagued by illness died in his sleep. But once the note was found, and it became clear what had happened, they found an empty box that Glasow and a couple of the other servants recognized as one in which Friedrich carried poison on his person, and then the dregs in the cup of chocolate clinched it.

Nothing in there was quite conclusive, Amalie decided. True, he'd been the first person to discover Friedrich, but as valet, that would likely have been his fate whether the cause of death had been suicide, illness, or murder. The fact that the clothes had been removed, but not the chocolate, was interesting, as though someone wanted to leave as much evidence of suicide as possible. Yet if Glasow was innocent, it would be easy to believe that he hadn't suspected anything the night before. Friedrich was a deeply private person, for a monarch, and not an especially fastidious one. He might well have said he wanted to savor his chocolate on a cold winter's night without being disturbed, and have the dirty cup removed the next morning. No innocent servant would have found that strange.

Then Amalie turned to the autopsy report, but the problem with autopsies was that they couldn't distinguish between poison by murder and poison by suicide. She knew Friedrich had servants taste his coffee and chocolate, but inconsistently, and the opium that was his suicide tool of choice wasn't something that the culprit would have hesitated to take a single spoonful of, while trusting that the entire cup would put Friedrich to sleep forever.

One nagging question the autopsy did answer was why Friedrich hadn't smelled or tasted the opium. She had long been bothered by the fact that chocolate might have been perfectly suited for suicide, but less so for murder. The poison should have given away its presence. Friedrich's notoriously mustard- and peppercorn-seasoned coffee would have been a better mask for foreign substances!

But according to the doctors, Friedrich had had a slight winter cold. Nothing serious, but enough congestion lingered that Amalie could easily imagine it had masked his sense of smell and made everything taste a bit off. And come to think of it, the dose in the cup needn't have been fatal in and of itself. If Glasow had been present while Friedrich was drinking, the cup might only have gotten him into a drugged state, in which he couldn't resist Glasow forcing more poison on him.

Amalie snorted bitterly when she realized she wasn't finding it at all difficult to plot the perfect crime. If she ever wanted to become a murderess, she could probably count on quite a successful career. But a plausible story only told her what could have happened, not what did happen. She needed more concrete facts.

So she reread closely, and then she spotted something she'd missed on the first read. Glasow wrote that Friedrich had sent away his dogs before going to bed. In and of itself, that wasn't suspicious. A suicidal king could have told his servants that the head cold had him too tired for their antics, and then taken advantage of the total solitude to kill himself, without needing to fear that a barking animal could lead to his premature discovery. As always, plotting suicide and plotting murder weren't terribly different.

But...hadn't Wilhelmine said that Alcmene was with him when he died? That she was found next to him in the morning?

Amalie knew who she was talking to next.

* * *

"How can I be of assistance to you, Your Highness?" Lieutenant Carl von Pirch, the favored page whom Friedrich had once teased affectionately, was in Berlin recovering from injuries from a gun that misfired while he was handling it. His once handsome face would never be the same, and he'd nearly died from his shattered ribs, but even pale, limping, and miserable, he answered Amalie's summons. She rather hoped he hadn't been involved in the murder, if murder it was.

She thanked him graciously for the trouble of visiting her in his condition, and then told him what she wanted: an exact account, exact as he could make it, of the activities of the royal Italian Greyhounds on the night of Friedrich's death.

Pirch looked surprised, but obligingly he started hunting through his memory. It was a normal day as far as he could remember. He wasn't primarily responsible for the dogs, but he participated in their care, and so he had a reasonable summary of how they'd spent their time.

"It was such a normal day, you see, that I can't vouch that I'm not confusing it with a different one. I can't say with a hundred percent certainty that on that specific afternoon, Diane was chasing a ball while Phyllis and Alcmene were napping by the fire."

"I understand. Focus on the evening, then."

The dogs had spent the early evening with Friedrich while he read, composed poetry, and played a bit on his flute, but then he'd wanted to sleep alone.

"Was that usual?"

"Unusual but not unheard of, madam. If he was having a migraine, for instance."

"And His Majesty told you himself that he didn't want the dogs?"

Pirch shook his head. "Glasow passed on the order. He told me to come get the dogs and hurry them away. He was very impatient, so I didn't ask a lot of questions."

"Did you go into the room? Was the King there?"

Pirch frowned, concentrating, and then he shook his head, very slowly this time, as he thought out loud. "The dogs were running in the corridor and I was trying to catch them as quickly and quietly as I could. I had the impression the King was sick and didn't want to be disturbed." Then he grew agitated. "I couldn't have known! I didn't know he was planning his own death!"

Amalie felt like snapping at the lieutenant that not everything was about him, but the last thing she wanted was to lose her cooperative witness. If he had been involved, she needed him off his guard, and if she hadn't, she needed him relaxed and remembering as accurately as possible.

"No, no, of course not," she soothed, laying on all the family charm that she'd inherited. She had it at her disposal when she wanted to call on it. "A devoted servant such as yourself could never imagine such a thing. It's just-" Amalie thought quickly. "It's just that His Majesty was always very particular about which dogs should be buried next to him, and which shouldn't, and we're wondering about Alcmene. If he chose to let her stay with him that last night, then we think she should be the last dog buried in the royal plot."

"Oh." Pirch's eyes went wide in his ruined face. "Is Alcmene sick? She's not dying, is she?"

Dammit, Amalie was digging herself into a hole here. She hadn't come prepared for a cross-interrogation. Deciding to stick as closely to the truth as possible, she said, "No, but she will one day." Inspiration occurred to her, and she added, "And my sister of Bayreuth won't be able to take care of her much longer. We need to decide who to give the dogs to after--after my sister can't any more--and whether to ask that Alcmene's body be returned to Sanssouci when her time comes." 

She hadn't meant for her voice to falter when she spoke of Wilhelmine, but her display of emotion had the unintentional effect of causing Pirch to drop his guard entirely. With naked sympathy on his face, he responded to her further questions with confessions that he might otherwise not have made.

No, he couldn't swear that the King had been present in the room when Glasow was shooing the dogs out. He didn't remember seeing him, and he hadn't looked closely.

"If His Majesty was so out of sorts he didn't even want his dogs, the last thing I would have done was set foot in the room, even with an open door, without a direct order. I'd never been hit yet, and I didn't mean to start."

"Had Glasow?"

Pirch hesitated, then looked at her as if to ask how much honesty she wanted. She kept her face bland and encouraging, and finally he nodded. "Yes, but he deserved it."

 _Perhaps he didn't think so._ Amalie filed that away. "Continue."

With the chaos of trying to catch the dogs, Pirch hadn't noticed until after a few minutes that he had three leashes in hand, not four. Alcmene was nowhere to be found, no one had seen her, and the door to the King's room was by then firmly closed. "She was his favorite; I assumed he'd decided to let her stay."

The next morning, he'd been lurking outside the door, knocking tentatively and waiting to see if he was wanted, while three dogs pulled at the leashes in his hands and Glasow barged straight inside.

"He was always more…" Pirch hesitated over how to phrase this. "Less likely to care whether the King wanted something or not. It didn't surprise me at all when he was locked up for selling battle plans." Pirch sounded both outraged and satisfied.

No, he hadn't seen the moment of discovery, and he hadn't seen Alcmene. When Glasow shouted at him to run for a doctor, his hands involuntarily let go of the leashes. By the time he returned, physicians in tow, everything had been a seething chaos of humans and dogs. And that was the first he'd seen inside the room.

It wasn't the clear-cut evidence Amalie had been hoping for, but it was at least consistent with the narrative that she was piecing together. Glasow had likely drugged the King first, gotten the inconvenient dogs out of the way, put him to bed, made sure he'd had a fatal dose, gone through his papers and either forged or constructed a suicide note, and left the King to die in his sleep.

At least it was painless, she told herself. Hating Glasow like the devil incarnate right now and struggling to conceal her emotions beneath a bland exterior, she coaxed every story about him out of Pirch, who was only too willing to share his grievances. None, though, had any bearing on the question of regicide. Finally, she dismissed him with her thanks.

As he was walking toward the door, he suddenly stopped.

"Your Highness. I just remembered something." 

Amalie looked at the lieutenant questioningly.

"When I was waiting outside the room with Diane, Phyllis, and Blanche, I heard Glasow curse at a dog. I didn't fully register it at the time, but...now that I think about it, he sounded very angry."

"You sound surprised. Was he normally patient with the dogs?"

"That's the thing. He wasn't always. But he never yelled at them when the King could hear him, not even if they'd made a big mess." He made a wry face. "One didn't yell at the royal bitches in the royal presence."

Amalie smiled. "Thank you, lieutenant. You've been very helpful."

* * *

In late summer, scarcely a month after he was imprisoned, Glasow sickened and died. The terms of his confinement were so stringent that not even a doctor or cleric was allowed to attend him, and he died untreated and uncomforted.

For what she hoped and expected would be the last time, Wilhelmine received the news from Amalie. Even her better days were no longer very good. Her feverish work on her Amon libretto, which had gotten her through some of the bad days, had slowed to a crawl. But at least today she had enough energy that she could sit and talk for a while with Amalie about what it meant.

It was almost too easy: they hadn't had to convince anyone but themselves, and yet justice had been done. Heinrich had seen to that. Perhaps the evidence accumulated by Fredersdorf and submitted by Amalie had helped raise suspicions in Heinrich's mind, perhaps it hadn't. Heinrich had been very reticent on the subject of his lover's crimes. But for whatever reason, Glasow had paid in the end.

"I suppose," said Wilhelmine, "when someone commits one outrageous crime, he's more likely to commit another, and eventually to get caught." 

"Fredersdorf saw it coming over a year before it happened," Amalie agreed. "If only Friedrich had seen past the pretty face."

Slowly and methodically, the sisters went over the evidence and reconstructed the sequence of events as best they could.

While in winter camp, Friedrich had been assassinated by his valet. Whether by accident or design, Glasow had made his move when Friedrich had enough congestion to mask his sense of taste and smell. 

He had relied on the fact that everyone knew Friedrich carried a box of poison and had spoken repeatedly of his willingness to use it. Glasow had planted that box, golden and oval, on the desk, next to a cup that contained just a little chocolate, and reeked of opium. He had, perhaps, blithely tasted the poisoned drink, convincing Friedrich that it was safe.

Glasow had definitely intended to remove all the dogs from the room the night of the assassination, but Alcmene had slipped back in and hidden somewhere. Whether Glasow had made some excuse to Friedrich for the dogs' absence, or whether Friedrich had been already too drugged to resist, they would never know.

With Friedrich dead or dying, Glasow had distributed the evidence he wanted to be found, fabricated a suicide note out of a real letter, and left the room. In the morning, he ensured not only that he was the first to happen upon Friedrich's body, but that he had a witness to his shock and horror. And, involuntarily, to his anger at finding Alcmene in the room.

Wilhelmine understood. "You don't yell at the King's favorite dog if you expect him to wake up again. Glasow knew he was dead before he ever saw the body."

After further discussion, they concluded that Glasow was likely operating alone, and that there was no reason to believe Catt and Pirch were anything but innocent bystanders.

Wilhelmine sighed. It was all the closure she was likely to get. "I wish, though, I understood _why_ he did it. He didn't receive a large bequest in Friedrich's will, did he?"

Amalie shook her head. "Not that I know of, nothing beyond the ordinary for a servant. What's even stranger is that after poisoning a king, he kept the same position, valet, and he joined the inner circle of the Regent. In other words, he stayed with the individual who had the most resources available to uncover what he'd done, the most incentive to punish him, and the most power to condemn him to death or to life imprisonment. Why take so great a risk for so little gain?"

That Friedrich could be short-tempered and parsimonious was undeniable, but if murder was the price, how could anyone who had servants sleep in their bed at night? And for a king, it was hard not to look for a more dramatic explanation.

Perhaps Friedrich had discovered his treason at Leuthen, and Glasow had acted quickly to save his own life. Perhaps he had hoped Heinrich would end the war.

"Perhaps the Austrians or the Saxons paid him," Amalie speculated.

"The Empress would never!" That was the most energetic outburst Wilhelmine had been capable of in weeks.

"It needn't have been her personally. She wasn't the one to whom he reported the plans the night of the battle, after all."

"I won't believe it," Wilhelmine said. No more would she have believed it of Friedrich if the Empress had been murdered. Regardless of personal rectitude, the assassination of one's fellow monarchs was a dangerous precedent to set, and these were civilized lands.

"He went rogue, then," agreed Amalie, placatingly. "Hoped for gratitude from the Austrians, and never got it. Or perhaps Glasow and Heinrich were already an item, and he was hoping for gratitude, or preferment, closer to home."

"If so, that backfired spectacularly," Wilhelmine observed with irony.

"To put it mildly. Is it possible we're attributing too much intelligence to Glasow? He was obvious enough to make Fredersdorf suspicious in the first place, and then he was caught by Heinrich for something that happened a year before." Amalie snorted. "I've honestly been more surprised he pulled off a nearly flawless assassination at all. But then, for all we know, he meant to drug Friedrich for one night, and accidentally overdosed him, and then he had to cover his tracks. Now that I think about it, that kind of blunder would be far more typical of Glasow than a plan skilfully executed from the beginning."

"Wait," said Wilhelmine. She was suddenly cold, all the way through, as she saw how several of the pieces could fit together. "What if that's it? You asked why Glasow would take the risk of staying near Heinrich when he gained nothing from the assassination. What if he was hoping for gratitude from Prussia's enemies, but he didn't get it because too little changed when Heinrich took control? We've surrendered Silesia, yes, but we're still occupying Saxony, at war with Austria, and so on and so forth. So what if Glasow stayed because Heinrich was the next step in his plan?"

"To spy on him?" Amalie nodded. "That could be."

"Or to influence him."

"Yes, and how disappointing that must have been. Heinrich's never let his lovers have any political sway. Wise," she observed sardonically, "if his taste is going to run toward Glasows rather than Fredersdorfs."

"And what then?" Wilhelmine prompted. "When a man capable of regicide discovers that gentler methods won't work with the successor?"

Amalie froze. "You're right. Heinrich may have dodged a bullet without realizing it. And Prussia, for there really is no one who can fill Friedrich's shoes once Heinrich is gone. Let us give thanks, then. If it weren't for needing to keep this a secret, I would have prayers said in all the churches, for Glasow's stupidity."

Wilhelmine gave her own thanks, silently. That Friedrich's murderer had been brought to justice, even if through his own carelessness rather than because his ultimate crime was known. That she had lived long enough to see justice done, and that she'd been given time to assuage her sorrow by pouring it into the creation of a libretto. And one thanksgiving on Friedrich's behalf.

_You asked the gods to take you in my place. That wasn't to be, but you may well have been taken in Heinrich's place. Your death was not in vain, brother of my heart._


	4. Chapter 4

As Wilhelmine's life continued to ebb, the visits from her family intensified, as if they knew every opportunity might be the last. Everyone was careful to keep the stays short and pleasant, and to offer to leave if she looked tired. Often, she would drift out of the conversation but encourage, even insist, that her visitors stay and talk. In the same way, there were times when she couldn't focus on the book one of her ladies was reading aloud to her, but she still wanted to let the soothing voice wash over her, anchoring her to life and at the same time easing her passage out of it.

Even Amalie and Mina, who weren't especially known for enjoying each other's company, made the effort to get along when they found themselves in Wilhelmine's rooms together. Music was always a safe subject, and when Wilhelmine couldn't participate, at least she could listen. Amalie would sometimes speak about her latest compositions, and Mina about performances she'd participated in or attended.

Listening, Wilhelmine's mind wandered again to her opera. It was almost complete now, her libretto about the enlightened king Amon, who, ruling with his beautiful and accomplished queen, was a beacon of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience, offering his protection to those who were persecuted by tyrants. Unfortunately, Amon's trusted servant, unbeknownst to the king, was someone who secretly wished for the old dark days back, and the servant would kill his master. But though Amon was cut down, and his killer escaped detection, the king would still be avenged: the servant's evil ways would cause his downfall, and he would himself be slain in the final scene.

It gave her some kind of peace to know that someday, someone might see the opera and understand how Friedrich had been betrayed. It gave her even more peace to know that, regardless of the success or failure of her work, Glasow's moment in the sun as regent's favorite had been followed swiftly by rotting in prison.

 _I would have locked you up where you would never see moon nor sun again._ Her father's voice came out of the past, threatening her with the consequences she would have faced if her brother's attempted flight had succeeded. Now it was Friedrich locked away forever, beneath the earth, unable to see the vineyards and gardens he'd created blooming under the summer sun.

 _Sooner or later, we all end up in the darkness, Father,_ she thought. _Sooner or later._

"I can always tell when you're thinking about Fritz," Amalie said, gently. Wilhelmine looked up, and realized she had sighed aloud.

She tilted her head, admitting it. "We were raised together. And there are good memories, too." She smiled at Mina. "Did he ever tell you about the time my dog Folichon wrote a letter to his Biche, and she wrote a letter back?"

"No," Mina smiled back. "But of course, the two of you would have literary dogs. Did they ever correspond with Voltaire?"

"No, but what a wonderful idea! It's not too late for you," Wilhelmine said to Alcmene. "Just see that you don't speak too highly of Maupertuis, he hates that."

Laughter filled the room.

"Also Leibniz," Mina added. "Don't say anything about monads or the best of all possible worlds."

"Did you get all that, Alcmene?" Wilhelmine said. "Now you're ready to pick up the correspondence where your last master left off."

"Really, if that's what you're after," Amalie pointed out, "she needs to defend Maupertuis as vigorously as possible."

"Oh, _Alcmene_ wrote that pamphlet!" Wilhelmine joked. "No wonder it was published anonymously. She's a very modest dog." Her hand stroked Alcmene's dark fur, and Alcmene preened.

Remembering one of Friedrich's pamphlet wars was bittersweet, and the shared grins, although sincere, were also strained.

After a moment of silence, Amalie said graciously to Mina, "That reminds me, I meant to thank you for copying the documents from the archive so my sister could see them."

Wilhelmine saw Mina brighten at the unaccustomed cordiality from Amalie. "Yes, all my thanks," Wilhelmine echoed. She was grateful that her sister and sister-in-law were setting aside their frictions, even temporarily, for her.

"It was nothing, if it helped," Mina said solicitously, looking at Wilhelmine.

"It did, I can't thank you enough. And I hope it wasn't too distressing for you." Wilhelmine hadn't been able to bear to read more than the brief purported suicide note, and Amalie had been fortified by her sense of being on a mission. But poor Mina had had to copy the whole collection of material by hand, for no reason other than to comfort Wilhelmine.

But Mina gave her a reassuring smile. "For you, it would have been worth it no matter what, but no, copying them out was even helpful to me in a way I didn't expect."

She stopped as though to leave it there, but when she saw them looking at her curiously, she hesitated, stammered, and finally said, "It was nothing. It was during a fight, and I'm sure he didn't mean it. It's only that when he was in Berlin for the funerals, Heinrich showed me the snuffbox from which he said the King had taken that final, fatal dose of poison. I thought he meant the King had taken poisoned snuff, but the archive was very clear on the fact that it was opium with his chocolate, and even the boxes don't match. That one was oval and golden, and the one in Heinrich's room was blue and white."

"Blue and white...porcelain?" Amalie asked, in an odd tone of voice, causing Wilhelmine to look at her curiously.

"Yes," Mina said. "Exactly. Shaped like a chest of drawers. Perhaps he didn't mean after all that was _the_ snuffbox--in hindsight, I thought it was odd that he would have it with him. Perhaps I misunderstood and he was only looking at the nearest one in his room, and he meant that he knew where to find the real one. It--it made sense if you were there," she said hastily. Clearly this fight with her husband wasn't one she wanted to relive. "At any rate, now I can erase the sight of that blue and white box from my memory. It had nothing to do with the King's death."

Amalie sucked in a sharp, involuntary breath, but she refused to elaborate. After a moment, Mina directed the conversation back to music, and the conversation resumed, if a bit haltingly. But when Mina took her leave, Amalie lingered.

Wilhelmine was alarmed by the agitation visible on Amalie's face. "What? What's wrong?"

"That box! That snuffbox that Heinrich said Friedrich took poison from, I recognize it. I mean, of course I recognize it from before the catastrophe, when he was visiting Mother shortly after the war started. He owned a box like that. But what I meant was, I watched him bury it with Wilhelm. He opened the coffin and put the snuffbox inside, in Wilhelm's pocket. I couldn't understand why, except wanting one last link to join him with Wilhelm--forever."

Wilhelmine just stared at her sister. She knew where Amalie had to be going with this, but her mind couldn't take the next step right away.

"Wilhelmine," Amalie insisted, "Heinrich knows."

Wilhelmine shook her head to herself, trying to find the reason behind her immediate, instinctive terror at this revelation. She should be glad that someone with the power to punish Glasow had figured it out too...shouldn't she? Meanwhile, Amalie paced around the room. She enumerated her points on her fingers, each one dropping like a stone into Wilhelmine's heart. "He takes Glasow as a lover, he has a snuffbox, he tells his wife that the snuffbox is how Friedrich died, and he buries it with Wilhelm? It was his way of telling Wilhelm he was avenged. And burying the evidence. It must be."

And with that, Wilhelmine grasped the whole hideous chain. How Glasow could have pulled off the perfect assassination despite being someone who was so careless that he went about arousing suspicions left and right, until finally he died in prison.

There had been someone behind Glasow on this one occasion. Someone who was not careless. Someone who was intelligent, cool under pressure, and ruthless.

No.

Oh no.

"Then Glasow was acting at Heinrich's command," Wilhelmine said slowly.

"No." Amalie's pacing stopped abruptly as she stuttered, "No, Heinrich found out after the fact. That must be why he put Glasow in prison. Who knows if he even really sold information to the Austrians, maybe that was a cover story. And--I just realized--this explains why no one was allowed to visit him in prison."

"Because he might implicate the Regent," said Wilhelmine dully. 

Amalie stared at her in horror. "No! Why would you say such a thing?"

Wilhelmine didn't want to believe it either, but something, maybe Friedrich's spirit, was staring her in the face, compelling her to see this all the way through. "How did Glasow get a snuffbox that you said Heinrich owned before the family started to fall apart?"

"He gifted it to Glasow. Heinrich's always been a generous lover. Or-" Amalie grasped in the direction of the drawer in which the papers from the archives were kept. "Maybe Friedrich had one just like it, and we'll find it listed in his will. He and Heinrich both took as much porcelain as they could get when Meissen fell to the Prussian army, no surprise if they ended up with similar pieces. Or it was Heinrich's, and Glasow stole it. He had no morals, obviously." She was talking fast and gesturing wildly.

Wilhelmine felt as if she were walking through fire. It would destroy her, but even in her anguish, she had to pass through it to the other side. She could not let Friedrich down. "And it immediately ended up back in Heinrich's possession? To be buried with Wilhelm? If burying it with Wilhelm is a sign that he knew Friedrich was murdered, he must have known while he was in Berlin. And then Glasow wasn't punished for the Leuthen affair for three more months." It was all so clear in Wilhelmine's mind. "Glasow must have threatened to talk."

Amalie shook her head, looking frightened. "No, no. Maybe--maybe Heinrich gifted Glasow the snuffbox, then Glasow poisoned Friedrich with it. Then he told Heinrich that Friedrich had used it to commit suicide, and so Heinrich took it as a memento, and buried it with Wilhelm."

"And Heinrich believed that Friedrich happened to commit suicide with a snuffbox that belonged to his valet, a snuffbox which had recently been gifted to his valet by his brother? A box that just happens not to have been mentioned in any of the depositions that _Heinrich commissioned_ on the circumstances surrounding Friedrich's death? Heinrich's not that gullible, sister."

Amalie turned on Wilhelmine, her eyes blazing. "He's not that murderous, either! Whatever his private feelings about Friedrich, he was loyal. Even after Wilhelm's disgrace, he kept serving in the army, accepted a command. He refused to take over Wilhelm's, granted, but he still served. He continued fighting to the best of his considerable abilities, even though he didn't believe in this war." She took a deep breath, visibly trying to calm herself. "I'm sorry, but you never knew Heinrich. You moved to Bayreuth when he was a child, and you only met him a handful of times as an adult." Her voice filled with conviction, she said, "I can tell you this with certainty: he's never been a plotter. He may know now that Friedrich was killed, a part of him may even be secretly half-relieved, but he did not have anything to do with it."

 _Oh, Amalie_ , Wilhelmine thought, her heart breaking. She didn't even know whom it was breaking for. Amalie knew Heinrich better than Wilhelmine, it was true, but he was Wilhelmine's brother too, and she was no stranger to the dark side of mankind. In some ways, she thought, her distance might allow her to see him more clearly than Amalie. 

"You're right, he isn't a plotter," Wilhelmine said. "Glasow could have done the plotting. He was the one Fredersdorf suspected of nefarious intentions, he sold information to the Austrians at Leuthen, and he was the last person to see Friedrich alive and the first person to see him dead. After Wilhelm's death, when Friedrich went to Saxony and visited Heinrich, Glasow would have been present. He could have proposed regicide on that occasion. Then all Heinrich would have had to do was give the nod, and just enough advice to keep them from getting caught."

Amalie shuddered. "And somehow Heinrich approved of regicide and fratricide by proxy, but not of Glasow telling the Austrians to expect a surprise attack?"

"You said it yourself," Wilhelmine whispered. Then, louder: "Heinrich kept fighting, before and after Friedrich's death. He cares about Prussia, he cares about his men. One of his most vehement complaints about Friedrich has always been that Friedrich was too eager for battle and too accepting of high casualties as the price of victory. Heinrich might have talked himself into believing that the sacrifice was for the greater good." After all, she reflected, even Friedrich didn't wage bloody war after bloody war because he enjoyed it, at least not after the first one. He did it because he convinced himself, a philosopher king, that it was for the greater good, and the pious Empress convinced herself of the same. With enough motivation, people could justify anything.

" _After Wilhelm's death,_ " Wilhelmine said, meaningfully. "Tell me Heinrich couldn't have done something he would regret in a fit of temporary madness, something he would never otherwise do."

Amalie shook her head, but slowly, neither fully convinced nor fully unconvinced. "If our case against Glasow is too tenuous to share with anyone, this is far worse. I don't know how you can believe a chain of logic so weak."

"It wouldn't stand up in a court of law," Wilhelmine acknowledged. "Heinrich's too clever for that. But he's vulnerable to anger. He clearly didn't mean to blurt out to Mina that he had the weapon in question. He did so in the middle of a fight. He might not have meant to condone murder. But in the heat of anger, immediately after Wilhelm's death?" Wilhelmine stopped. The energy that had sustained her through this terrible realization fell away, and she was left with the horrific implications.

 _Oh, Friedrich,_ she thought, _my other half, how could it have come to this? Oh, Heinrich, what have you done?_

Amalie folded her arms. "I still think Friedrich had one just like Heinrich's, Glasow used it and gave it to Heinrich, and lied about it being suicide. Heinrich buried it with Wilhelm to signify Friedrich's regret and that Wilhelm could rest in peace now. And later Heinrich found out and that's why Glasow's in prison now. With or without passing battle plans to the enemy." Amalie's voice cracked slightly on the last sentence. _She knows,_ Wilhelmine thought, aching for her sister. _She knows that Heinrich must have been involved, she knows that this all holds together, and she's trying to keep herself from the knowledge._

_She's lost two siblings already, and is going to lose a third very soon, and she desperately doesn't want to lose Heinrich too._

With that, Wilhelmine knew that her hourglass was pouring out its final sands. There was no strength left in her to feel pity for anyone else's pain. She had given the last of her strength and pity to Friedrich on this quest, and given it freely. "Ask him. The next time you see him," she said, wearily. "I won't live that long."

* * *

Her opera was meaningless. She'd had the wrong story all along. Her opera had to be thrown out.

These thoughts whirled through Wilhelmine's mind, because they were the only thoughts she could wrap her mind around. She couldn't even begin to grapple with the concept of Heinrich condoning--ordering?--Friedrich's death. Every time she tried, a spasm of pain seized her until she couldn't breathe. Opera was kinder.

So from the Book of Kings, Wilhelmine turned to Roman kings, to Romulus and Remus. That old story that Friedrich had loved so much, of brother killing brother, would allow her to pour herself into art without letting reality overwhelm her. And she wouldn't think about what would happen after her opera was performed, whether the hidden message would be perceived, or how much more suffering her family would have to endure if it was. She would pen this final work because she had to, because she was an author and a sister.

In this formulation, Remus could have the arias Wilhelmine had given to the king in the earlier version of the opera. In fact, she thought, she could even keep the part where her enlightened monarch extended tolerance to all beliefs. Remus could offer his protection to Greek philosophers fleeing to Italy to escape tyrants. Pythagoras, perhaps. She considered it. Pythagoras had indeed moved to Italy, but if memory served, he'd lived a little too late to be a contemporary of Romulus. But though she was too weak to consult her books, she rather thought the difference wasn't so great that it would jar the listener. 

She could change it later if she came upon a better idea, Wilhelmine decided. So little time remained that what mattered was not detail, but telling her story. Every night, she closed her eyes wondering if she would wake again, or die with her opus still unfinished.

It was a blessing, then, that much of the first opera could be reused. Her Remus would be the model of a philosopher king, like Amon. But then Remus and Romulus would fight, as in the legend.

And then Romulus would kill him.

A shudder went through her, but she ignored it. There was no family strife. There was no war. There was only the opera. Only the opera was real.

Romulus, in her story, would assert that the gods had favored his claim to kingship, that Remus had refused to accept this, and that he had banished Remus, who had gone north into exile in Germany. Romulus would make everyone believe he was innocent, that he was merely obeying the will of the gods.

And then what?

Too weak to write, Wilhelmine lay in bed, accepting visitors, taking her medicine, smiling with empty eyes, and furiously composing in her head. The shape of the opera grew more tangible in her mind. The queen's arias in this version would go not to a wife but a sister, the foster sister of Romulus and Remus. Though she was but the daughter of humble shepherds, the ties of being brought up as children together were stronger than blood, and she would love her brothers as her own.

But then, she would find out the terrible secret. Wilhelmine would give her another aria, a virtuoso scene, in which she agonized over where her duty to her family lay. A cruel fate had forced her to choose between leaving one brother unavenged and turning on another brother. Her aged parents were already grieving their exiled son; should she afflict them further by telling them that no, he was dead, and their other beloved son was a fratricide?

Could she even be wholly sure she was right? Might H--might Romulus not actually be innocent and her accusations unfounded? And Romulus was powerful now, a mighty king, founder of Rome. Would anyone even believe her, if she spoke?

Wilhelmine did not notice she was weeping as she composed the aria in her mind.

But how to end it? What would the tormented sister decide? What would the outcome be?

That night, Wilhelmine slept, and she dreamed. 

When she awoke, little remained of her dream. A lingering sense of sorrow and peace, and some fragmentary images. Her memory presented her with each image embedded in a tiny piece of amber: Mina's face, turning away; Heinrich screaming silently, in anger or in pain; a torn-up portrait of their family; Amalie holding out her hand to Mina, who took it; a house destroyed; the destroyed house built up again.

But her question was answered. The ghost of Remus would appear and demand justice. He would remind his sister of the love that had always existed between them, since their tender youth, of the pipes they had played together in the hills--

Wilhelmine could go no further. And she knew how close she was to running out of time. She needed to make sure what she had so far was not totally lost.

She sent for her daughter. "Friederike," she announced, "I'm changing my opera."

Friederike regarded her quizzically. "The Amon opera? I didn't realize you were still working on your libretto."

"Yes. It's now going to be about Romulus and Remus, though I'm carrying over some of the arias. You'll have to take dictation for me. And, this is important-"

"Oh, Mother, don't overexert yourself," Friederike cried, and Wilhelmine heard the pain in her voice. But she could not spare Friederike any more than she could spare herself.

"Friederike, this opera must be staged, do you understand? Even if I cannot finish it, you must. I can die in peace if I know it won't be dropped because I didn't live long enough to see it through." Wilhelmine's swollen fingers seized her daughter's sleeve. "Commission the finishing and polishing of the libretto, the composition of the music, and the performance. Stage it in the opera house I built. Beg, borrow, or steal the money, but it must be staged." She would not allow herself to consider too closely the motives beneath her insistence.

"Mother-"

"Promise me!"

Friederike yielded. "I promise." Wilhelmine looked her up and down and was satisfied by what she saw there.

"Then let us begin," said Wilhelmine.

* * *

_"You were so sure you could do better," Friedrich's voice taunted Heinrich. He couldn't see his older brother, but he couldn't shut out the voice that echoed from all sides, surrounding him. "Give back Silesia, make peace, preen over your moral high ground. And now where are you?"_

Heinrich jolted awake, sweating despite the chilly night. Where was he?

Poland. He was in Poland, occupying the part of Prussia that didn't belong to the Hohenzollerns while he sought to recover the part that did. He'd been forced to follow in Friedrich's footsteps in deflating the currency to keep his army solvent, but he kept strict discipline and didn't allow any of the kind of plundering that had taken place in Saxony under the previous regime. If he hadn't managed to close the war, it was because he was preserving his soldiers' lives and treating civilians with respect.

 _And how many people are suffering while you drag this war out instead of deciding it once and for all with a battle, because you're too squeamish to pull a decaying tooth?_ The nightmare might have officially ended when Heinrich woke up, but the voice was relentless in its needling. _You were quick enough to pull me...brother._

Kalckreuth's arm was flung over him where he'd fallen asleep last night. Heinrich was bearing up well enough under his duties as general and regent, but finding it harder and harder to endure the quiet moments alone. He was grateful to his adjutant for these indulgences, even if they came with the occasional grumble. Kalckreuth wouldn't be Kalckreuth, after all, if he tamely gave Heinrich everything he asked.

Heinrich drummed his fingers on his thigh for a moment, tempted to wake his lover. Together, they could usually get Heinrich's mind off of everything, if only for an hour. But no, let him sleep. He put up with enough.

That left Heinrich on his own. He pondered his options. There was no chance he'd be able to settle down enough to read, and he didn't want to disturb anyone with the sound of his violin. Finally, he threw on his coat against the Polish winter and woke his page. At least the boy was getting paid to deal with Heinrich's nocturnal maunderings. He walked in front, lighting the way for his prince to pace restlessly through the house. Then Heinrich noticed a light coming from the room that he had repurposed as a library.

Amalie was sitting at the table, writing busily. She looked up when he came in.

"Can't sleep?" Her voice was all sweetness. "You must have a lot weighing on your shoulders."

He smiled at her, glad he'd asked her to come visit him in winter quarters, and glad she'd come. Amalie wasn't the close confidante that Wilhelm had been--God, it still shocked him to the core to remember that Wilhelm was gone forever--but she was his sister. Sometimes loving, sometimes caustic, and never boring.

Heinrich told his bleary-eyed page to leave the lamp and go back to bed. If Heinrich managed to fight his insomnia off before dawn, he could find his own way back to the bedroom. 

He sat down across from his sister and realized, with a small shock, that this would be his first chance to speak to her alone since her arrival. Had he really been so busy, or was he keeping busy because the alternative was worse?

"You as well," he said sympathetically to Amalie. "This family has suffered, and you and I have been left to carry the burdens. When the war's over, I want you to come up to Rheinsberg to visit me. We'll have music, banquets, plays, everything you could desire. You deserve a respite. You've been fighting your own kind of war, haven't you?"

Amalie laughed hoarsely at that. "You don't know how much, brother."

Now that he was looking more closely, Heinrich saw how thin she was, and how tight the corners of her mouth were. "And the spa, I want you to take the waters when it's safe to travel. The crown will pay for it." Amalie was healthier than Wilhelmine had been, but that wasn't saying much, and the last three years must have worn on her terribly. "In the meantime, I'll make sure we have the chance to play together while you're here. It's been too long." Amalie, whose skill on the harpsichord far surpassed his on the violin, wasn't always the most patient with his limitations, but as long as they kept to pieces that were within his ability, she played from the bottom of her soul every time. "You can borrow Fas--" He stuttered over the name of a musician he abruptly remembered Amalie had tried very hard to get. "You can borrow one of the portable keyboards we brought on campaign."

Amalie's mouth quirked into a smile that was nonetheless melancholy. "I had a spinet brought to Wilhelmine's rooms when she stayed with us. Your wife and I played for her when she was strong enough to listen."

Ignoring the reference to his wife--why did people insist on reminding him that she existed?--Heinrich confined himself to his sisters. "That was kind of you. I can't tell you how surprised I was when you wrote that she'd arrived in Berlin. Was her end peaceful?" Amalie's letter had depicted Wilhelmine slipping away after a struggle with her long illness, but it had been light on details, heavy on blotches and tear stains.

"Mmmm. Yes and no," she answered. "She didn't die in excruciating physical pain, at least." They were both silent a moment, thinking of Wilhelm. Heinrich squeezed her hand, silently thanking her for being at his side when it happened, then for breaking the news with sympathy and tact. Nothing like the letter Friedrich had written, which still had the power to inflame Heinrich with rage, even now.

"But," said Amalie, looking very intently at Heinrich, "her spirit, no, it was not peaceful. She died when her brother did."

"No doubt," he admitted, hiding his discomfort. "But she and Wilhelm had grown quite close too in recent years. I'm sure the first blow did her no good."

"Oh, no, it didn't," Amalie agreed, still watching him. "But the final blow was what killed her. She had no will to live after that."

Something about "the final blow" made Heinrich hesitate. Was there something he didn't know? Though he'd barely known his oldest sister, he wasn't without some guilt for how the events of the last year had affected her, losing her Friedrich as he'd lost his Wilhelm. But he always came back to reminding himself that the blame lay at Friedrich's door. This could all so easily have been avoided.

There was a taut silence. Finally Amalie bit her lip and looked down, as if she were gathering her nerve for something. What, he couldn't imagine. "Speaking of wills to live, are we waiting for the Czarina to die?"

Heinrich blinked. The change of topic to Russian politics wasn't at all what he'd expected. But she didn't raise her face to give him any clues as to what she was thinking, and finally he shrugged and obliged her. "Not waiting, no," Heinrich said. "I'm doing my best to outmaneuver the Russians in the field, even if she recovers. Though it goes without saying that her death might end the war. In the worst case, if her nephew doesn't have the same admiration for me that he did for the late King," _And he should!_ Heinrich thought, but he had to admit his uncontested surrender of Silesia hadn't been calculated to impress, "then there's always his wife. Sophie, or Catherine as she's known in Russia, and I have been friends since we were children." Of course, there was no way to be sure that friendship would survive the rapids of politics, but it had to be better than the virulent mutual hatred of Czarina Elizabeth and Friedrich, a hatred that she had easily transferred to Heinrich.

"Maybe," suggested Amalie in a voice that was still filled with sweetness, "Catherine can poison her husband and rule as regent for their son."

Heinrich froze, and all of his senses went into a state of heightened alertness, exactly as if he were in battle. He knew, none better, that Amalie was no fool, and she would not bandy about insinuations like that lightly. What did she know? "I'm sure she would never do such a thing," he said steadily, "but she might have some influence over her husband nonetheless." He wasn't actually as positive as he made himself out to be, for Sophie was his kindred soul in more ways than one, but he had to draw out Amalie more.

"Oh, no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to impugn her honor. I meant to say, maybe she can have her _lover_ poison her husband so she can rule." She raised her eyes to his. They held no mercy.

_Amalie knows._

He broke into a cold sweat. That shouldn't have been possible. But how she'd found out mattered less than what she believed. That she could think so little of him, that was unbearable. "Not to rule. Never to rule," he insisted, then realized he'd spoken too loudly. But he couldn't stop the flood of words pouring forth. He needed to make her understand. "If you believe one thing, believe this. I never wanted power. I always knew Wilhelm was the heir, I never even thought of-"

"But Wilhelm is dead. When he died, you must have realized that Friedrich was all that stood between you and the kingship in all but name, Regent Heinrich." Her tongue, which she'd always known how to wield as a weapon, felt like a sword gutting him.

Through all his nightmares of Friedrich challenging him from beyond the grave, Friedrich's voice echoing in his head, he had never thought that Amalie would be the one to judge him. And yet it was right that she be the one, for she had loved Wilhelm as well, and she had suffered as much, in her own way.

"You of all people!" he cried, as outraged and pained as she. "You know better than anyone what Friedrich put him through. Not once but twice. And when he'd made greater mistakes himself! And you're the one who described to me how hard Wilhelm clung to death when he realized life had nothing to offer him." His rage was mostly for Friedrich, but he had to admit he was also still angry, a little, at Wilhelm. _What about me?_ a small, abandoned voice cried deep within him.

"I heard you provoked that encounter," she said coolly.

"Provoked." Heinrich spat the word. "Yes, any time anyone disagreed with Friedrich, it 'provoked' him to take his anger out on an innocent party. After Leuthen, which he passed off as a victory, but it was all meaningless if the Austrians still held Silesia, I told him he should admit he could make mistakes and allow Wilhelm back into the army. So he went on a semi-public diatribe about Wilhelm's so-called failings. No, it wasn't the elaborately staged humiliation of a few months before, but when word got out, it was enough. You saw. You watched him die."

"Yes." Her voice, her face, her eyes, everything about her was unforgiving. "And so you thought: 'I know. More death. That's the solution.'"

"Glasow came to me with the idea after Wilhelm's second humiliation. I forbade it. Then Wilhelm died." He was so hollow inside he could hear the emptiness ringing in his voice. "Nothing I did could change that." At the time, it had felt like nothing he did could ever have any effect at all, so long as the tyrant who ruled their lives still breathed.

He could not tell Amalie, but Wilhelm's death itself had not been what finally tipped the scales. It had been the letter he received from Friedrich about Wilhelm after his death: _Reflecting on my dear brother's warm heart and his other good qualities, I endured with gentleness many things in his conduct, which were very irregular, and by which he failed in what he owed me._ In that moment he had seized his pen and written to Glasow: _Do it._

And then he was committed. He'd had to see it through.

He said, low, "I would have thought the sister who was present at Wilhelm's deathbed would understand."

Amalie's hands were clamped tightly together. "Being angry at the late King, yes. Hoping he would change his mind, of course. Even hating him I could forgive. I did, a little. But willing his death? This sister has been present at far too many deathbeds to look forward to another. And the neverending war, with more death every day. No, I can't say I do understand."

None of her reproaches were anything he didn't hear from his own mind at night, and so he had his answers at hand. "Don't talk to me about more death," said Heinrich tightly. "Friedrich, that bloodthirsty maniac, plunged us into this war, and then every time we blinked, he wanted to gather his forces into another decisive battle. Except they were never decisive, and even when we won, our casualties were likely to be higher than the enemy's. Do you know what Saxony looked like under his occupation? The civilians are far more cooperative these days, and much less likely to want to start another war for revenge after this one is over." He had told himself this over and over again. It wasn't just about Wilhelm. There were so many other people he could protect now, not just avenge. What was one man's life against that?

Heinrich took a deep breath and uttered his final defense with emphasis. "Amalie, my generals aren't afraid to make mistakes." 

Maybe she couldn't know what an effect on high command Wilhelm's humiliation had had, but even Heinrich had felt his natural reluctance to throw away his soldiers' lives suddenly compounded by an even more natural reluctance to be verbally hanged and quartered for a single misstep. Now that Friedrich was no longer the Damocles' sword hanging over his head, Heinrich was more likely to hazard a battle, though still less eager than his predecessor. He was free to be the best he could be, for his country.

Amalie looked less impressed than he'd hoped. He forged ahead with another question that had been worrying at him since she had revealed her knowledge. "Who else knows?"

"The only one who knew was Wilhelmine, and she took it to her grave. In fact, it took her to her grave."

 _No._ Not Wilhelmine. Aside from her blind, _blind_ loyalty to the Firstborn, whom she clearly always saw as the boy he'd been rather than the man he'd become, he had no grudge against her. He'd been fond of her. "She would have died anyway. She had consumption, dropsy. She was on her last legs."

Friedrich's voice. _The autopsy found blood in Wilhelm's brain. A broken heart isn't fatal._

"No doubt. But she outlived Friedrich by almost a year, and the discovery of how he died by little more than a week. I was there, Heinrich."

"Then why did you tell her? And you have the nerve to come here firing accusations at me?" The longer he lived, the more Heinrich started to feel that Friedrich had been onto something. Sometimes a good offense really was the best defense.

"She was the one who worked it out. I didn't want to believe. Heinrich, how could you!" It was a primal cry of pain.

But still, even in her pain, he saw that she remained in control enough not to name the crime of which she was accusing him. He would, of course, deny any accusation made in so many words: he couldn't afford to give her the ammunition of a quote that she could wield against him later. And she seemed to understand that he would meet her halfway only if she would meet him halfway. They circled each other like wary opponents. 

"I did nothing that can be undone," he reminded her. He kept his voice as soft and persuasive as he was capable of. "Whether you think I was justified or not, I can't change what happened." He put a hand on hers. She made as if to draw it back, but did not. There were tears glimmering in her eyes. "What matters is what's going to happen now. What will you do now that you know, dearest sister?"

Even as he said the words, he was thinking of what he would do if she spoke out against him. Invoke hysteria, perhaps. A hysterical female who'd just lost three of her siblings in a year, two of them with her in attendance at their deathbeds.

But anything less hysterical he couldn't imagine. She had the courage of their family, he had to admit. Her fierce blue eyes, so like Friedrich's, met his with resolve. Her hands under his started shaking slightly, and at that, she deliberately removed them from his and placed them in her lap while she considered.

If she did go public, accusations of hysteria or no, there would be problems. He knew her well enough to know that she had the strength and the will to persevere, and although he hadn't realized she also had the intelligence to uncover his actions, he knew it now. Even without the ability to remove him from power, she could make his life uncomfortable, if only by creating rumors where there had been none before. 

If he could not convince her, then, he would have to move quickly. Declare preemptively that she had at last collapsed under the stresses of her recent life, and have her kept in a gilded cage, too "sick" to see anyone. Though Heinrich was too young to remember, he knew well that their father had done it once to Wilhelmine, for the better part of a year. But even beyond the risks that Amalie would find a way to smuggle a message out, he'd already lost Wilhelm, and she was his closest sister. He would much prefer to convince her. And if he won her over, then maybe he could sleep through the night again, absolved at last.

"Suppose you make your accusations public," Heinrich said, still very gently, "and suppose you are believed, and I am stripped of the regency. Then what do you think will happen? Not to you: I imagine you've already thought about the risks of challenging me, and you might be willing to pay the price. So be it. But Prussia, how will it fare?"

"You have blood on your hands," said Amalie starkly. "For me to keep silent, what justice would there be in that?"

"But what of the blood on Friedrich's hands?" It made Heinrich angry, how easily that had passed by without question. And why wasn't she asking what might drive a valet to kill his king? That damned Friedrich and his untarnishable reputation. "What of Wilhelm's blood?" He nodded at her flinch. "And all the Prussian blood shed in this war, not to speak of enemy soldiers fighting in a war he started. And what of justice for soldiers who might yet live, but will die if the war is mishandled now? I mean to get us out of this war, Amalie, and position Prussia for a better future. Unless you think you can do better?"

Watching her intently, Heinrich saw in her eyes that flicker of ambition, that feeling that he knew so well of blood surging to rise to a challenge...and then the light went out as she remembered that she was a woman. She had only to look at what Maria Theresia had had to face, and that was an empress who'd inherited her territories with the agreement of every major power in Europe. Like the Empress, Amalie might eventually emerge triumphant, but at the cost of internal strife during a time of war. Without a peaceful transfer of power, Prussia would be eaten alive by its enemies.

Amalie's lips drew together, and she said nothing.

Heinrich pressed his advantage. "Who else is there? Ferdinand, the only remaining brother if you eliminate me? His hands are clean, I'll grant you."

"No," said Amalie unwillingly. They both knew that Ferdinand, fond as they might be of him, could not fill Heinrich's shoes.

"Or Ferdinand of Brunswick? A skilled general and the King's uncle, true, but...not a Hohenzollern and not even a Prussian. Seydlitz can win a battle, but would anyone let him decide foreign policy, economic policy, strategic objectives? Or maybe you had another candidate in mind." He said more softly, "Think, Amalie. Friedrich is gone, and speaking out against me won't bring him back; it will only bring ruin on others. More death, in your own words."

Amalie closed her eyes and opened them again. At last she said quietly, "The King will be of age soon. He's fifteen already." As soon as she said that, he knew he had her.

"Yes," he agreed soberly, taking care not to sound at all triumphant. "And when the war is over, I'll be glad to step down and retire to Rheinsberg. But until then, there is no one else."

After a long silence, Amalie rose from her seat. Holding his gaze with hers, she gave him a deep curtsy, deeper than she'd ever given him in her life, and then she left the room.

Heinrich breathed. He was safe. Prussia was safe.


	5. Epilogue

Finally, the war was over. Leaving aside Maria Theresia's obvious joy in welcoming the Silesians back into the Austrian fold, it was difficult for most of the participants to know whether to celebrate the outcome. But after several long years of bloodshed, everyone could agree on celebrating the peace. England had won and France lost an overseas empire, and Russia, under new leadership, pulled out of an increasingly costly war, leaving the Elector of Brandenburg still King of Prussia. "Of" Prussia in fact as well as name now, for while losing Silesia and restoring Saxony to independence, Heinrich had held onto East Prussia and added West Prussia to his nephew's territory, while luckless Poland was the loser on all fronts.

The return of peace meant other, more minor changes as well. One was having the funds to stage new operas. Friederike, Duchess of Württemberg, was back in Bayreuth, distracting herself from the recent loss of her father, and the less recent but still painful loss of her mother, with work on the one's palace and the other's opera. She'd finished commissioning the music to her mother's final composition and putting the finishing touches on the libretto years ago. But as the war raged on, prices rose, and troops demanded pay, she'd been forced to wait before staging it. Now at last she was free to fulfill her mother's last wishes.

Friederike's decision to assume responsibility for finishing the libretto had come as a surprise even to herself. It had started when she began writing up the draft and notes to send to a professional, and found herself filling in gaps in the libretto and smoothing out rough patches. With a little trepidation, she had thought, _Why not?_ and kept going. She'd even come up with an ending. Her mother had not gotten any further than the scene in which Remus appeared to his sister to demand justice, and had not given her any instruction about what might come next. Friederike had added a scene in which the queen prayed to the gods, who themselves declared the murderer in a grand deus ex machina.

Despite all her fears that she didn't have any skill and should leave the matter to those who did, she found herself enjoying the challenge. No one had ever told her that pushing herself like this might feel as exhilarating as it did terrifying, but it was something she'd found to be true when she left her husband and started to build a life of her own. Now here she was, looking forward to seeing the fruits of her labor on stage, as the postbellum world slowly returned to normal.

Another benefit of peace was that travel was safe again. Friederike was especially glad of it when Voltaire found his way to Bayreuth. 

"Uncle Voltaire! How good of you to make us one of the stops on your travels. No, I'm not a duchess or a 'Highness' to you, only a niece. Mother always said you were like a brother to her."

They embraced, and Friederike invited him for a private dinner as soon as he was settled in. She hadn't seen him since she was ten years old, but her mother had spoken of him so often and so affectionately that she felt she knew him well.

Voltaire was en route to Prussia, which he had assiduously avoided since his final falling out with Friedrich. She didn't think he quite regretted his decision, but she could see in his eyes the finality of knowing he could never, in a very real sense of the word, go back. Heinrich would welcome him, of course, but the king he loved to hate and hated to love was gone forever.

The old philosopher tried to hide the strength of his feelings, but the fact that he was returning to Prussia couldn't all be about Heinrich and Amalie, no matter how often he praised them or spoke of the pleasure he'd one had putting on private performances of his plays with them. 

His obsession slipped out in little ways, as well. After her guest had politely praised Bayreuth, her building efforts, and her patronage, and that of her parents, Voltaire quickly turned the conversation to Prussia. He asked about Friedrich's building projects, which ones were being continued, and which abandoned. Friederike obligingly told him what she knew of Heinrich's plans, which included a large number of his own initiatives. Above all, he was constructing a tribute primarily to his late and disgraced brother Wilhelm and secondarily to the other war dead, especially those he saw as slighted by the late King. It was going to be a war of pamphlets and of monuments, and with Friedrich dead, Heinrich would have the last word. But Friedrich was still the Great, and he cast a long shadow.

Voltaire cocked an eyebrow. "Prince Heinrich's planning to remain in power, then, the man behind the throne."

Friederike shrugged. "He doesn't confide in me, but I haven't heard otherwise. He's so active, militarily, politically, and diplomatically, that it's hard to imagine him not at the center of everything. He's become an institution of Prussia."

She then turned the praise back on Voltaire, calling out especially the Calas affair. Jean Calas, a Frenchman, had been convicted of the murder of his son two years ago, and gone to a gruesome death protesting his innocence. When Voltaire had discovered that the only "crime" for which there had been evidence against Calas was that of being Protestant in Catholic France, he'd waged a crusade for justice. Though he'd never so much as heard of the man before his execution, he protested this travesty by pamphlet and by letter. Relentless as only Voltaire could be, he appealed for years to officials, powerful friends, and public opinion, until finally he triumphed.

"Even though it doesn't bring back the dead, to have the verdict overturned posthumously was a mighty coup for a mighty _philosophe_ ," Friederike gushed.

Voltaire nodded, and anger tinged his voice. "That a man can be killed with no trial worthy of the name, and there be no outcry and no consequences--I couldn't stand for it."

"France is a better place because of your work, even if you have to live in exile to be free to pursue your causes. Truly, the pen is mightier than the sword."

A pleased smile crossed his face, but then his expression turned melancholy. "And yet my pen couldn't keep a philosopher king from falling on his already bloody sword."

The paradox of Voltaire was that his diatribes against Friedrich's wars were as sincere as his grief for the man who'd led them.

"The Margravine was buried with him at Sanssouci?" Voltaire asked.

"By his wish and hers," Friederike confirmed. Tears came to her eyes, because it meant her own tomb would never lie beside her mother's, but she couldn't deny that her mother and uncle had been separated for too long. "They found this poem among his papers. I wanted to show you."

Voltaire picked up the sheet of paper. His face crumpled into recognition as soon as he started reading. "Yes, he sent me a copy. He nearly got his wish."

"Yes." Friedrich hadn't outlived his sister, at least, and even if his death hadn't saved her from the reaper's scythe, they did now lie, as he'd closed his poem, ' _with one grave enclosing our intermingling dust._ '

She felt Voltaire's hand on her shoulder, and though she couldn't see through her swimming eyes, she could tell from his breathing that he was crying as hard as she was. She clung to his hand as they wept together.

When their shared grief had passed over like a storm, Friederike sought to console them both with art, which had always consoled her mother and uncle.

"I'd like you to come and see the new opera while you're here. My mother wrote the libretto, her last before she died. In fact, she wasn't able to quite finish it herself. It's a new take on the founding of Rome, of Romulus and Remus. She invokes the version told by the locals at Rheinsberg, in which--you know this story?"

Voltaire was nodding as she spoke. "That Remus wasn't killed, but fled to Germany and settled at Rheinsberg, giving his name to the village. Friedrich was the first person who told me of that story, back when he lived there, before he gave the palace to Prince Heinrich. He used to address his letters from 'Remusberg'." Voltaire's mouth twisted with mixed nostalgia and grief.

Friederike hadn't known that. She'd meant this conversation to be a distraction, not another reminder. But there was so much shared history between Voltaire and Friedrich that he must be faced by reminders everywhere. Awkwardly, she continued, "In my mother's version, Remus is indeed killed by Romulus, but Romulus claims he had only banished him. The narrative plays with the boundary between history and legend."

"Oh, that sounds extremely interesting. Was she saying that we're always dependent on conflicting stories, and what we believe is true might not be? That would make sense, if she was countering the rumors that Prince Wilhelm died of grief. And it was the case I was making when I wrote to the Crown Prince about the absurdities of Roman legend. Hmm." Voltaire's eyes were alive with interest in his lined face as he thought out loud. It warmed Friederike's heart to see her attempt at distracting him finally having an effect.

"It's a many-layered story. I think each person who watches it has to decide what it means to them." Though Friederike had been the one to turn the draft into its final form, she had never been able to settle on a single meaning. In the end, she'd decided it wasn't limited to one. 

"Your mother was a woman of rare taste, and I very much look forward to developing my own interpretation of her last piece."

"I hoped you would," Friederike said, smiling at Voltaire. "Come, let me show you the margravial opera house." She reached out for his proffered arm, and they set off together.

* * *

How appropriate, Voltaire reflected, to be honoring the Margravine by attending her opera in her opera house. She'd commissioned it, composed for it, and performed in it. And now her final piece was being played in it.

The entrance to the building was unimposing, but the interior! It was justly ranked among the finest in Europe. Voltaire let his gaze rove admiringly over the spacious layout, the lavish sculptures and paintings, and tones of the gold and wood, which harmonized as beautifully as if they themselves were singing.

As he took his seat next to the Duchess, he mingled with the other guests in the box. Flattery was cheap, but he was pleased that word of the Calas affair had reached even this minor German principality. Oh, of course. He sighed internally. The Bayreuthers were primarily concerned with the Protestant/Catholic aspect of the conflict, and they were exulting that the Protestant cause had triumphed. Deeper concerns of justice and equality before the law were secondary considerations, if considerations to them at all.

Well, if skeptic extraordinaire Friedrich II had played the Protestant hero on the European stage for the sake of his wars, Voltaire could play one in a better cause. To one guest, then another, he said, "It's all in my book. The _Treatise on Tolerance_ , all the arguments I made are in there. The Catholics have banned it, but you'll help an old man out by buying a copy, won't you? Thank you, you're very kind. I'm sure your virtue will be rewarded by Heaven."

Then the performance began, and Voltaire settled in to enjoy himself.

He was pleased and not at all surprised that Wilhelmine, at least, had praised tolerance as a virtue wherever it was found, including among pagans. When her Remus took the stage and sang a resounding aria against tyranny and in favor of freedom of conscience, political and religious, Voltaire cheered. When Pythagoras, the most renowned philosopher of his day, came fleeing Ionia and seeking refuge in Italy, he beamed. How kind of the Margravine to think of him, and what a shame that she was no longer here for him to tell her how much he appreciated her work. And when Remus fell dead at the feet of Romulus, over a political squabble turned personal, Voltaire cried out loud at the injustice.

And then, as the foster sister sang her lament, he began to think. The ancient Romans had been noted for their tolerance. As long as their subjects obeyed the laws of the state, anyone could worship as he pleased. Even let a philosopher deny the existence of the state gods, and he could live in peace. All this despite the murder of Remus by Romulus.

In some ways, both fictional brothers in her libretto had done better than her flesh-and-blood brother: offering refuge to philosophers and religious freedom to his subjects, but burning pamphlets when it suited him. Voltaire's blood ran hot just remembering that chilly Christmas Eve, when Friedrich betrayed everything Voltaire had thought they both believed in. It had not been hard to leave Prussia after that.

And yet. And yet. Friedrich would have allowed the _Treatise_ to be published, had he lived; Voltaire was sure of it. His cry for resistance against the tyranny of the mind would have found a home in Frederician Prussia, and at some level, Friedrich would have meant it.

Voltaire realized that he would be carrying on an argument with this man until the day he died, and simultaneously, that nothing was lonelier than a one-sided argument. _My hero-poet-philosopher-warrior-mischievous-singular-brilliant-proud-modest king. Why aren't you here to infuriate and impress me?_

Putting aside that eternal ache, he returned his full attention to the performance as the lament ended and the plot resumed. Rome, not Reme, was founded; tolerance continued; Pythagoras was still welcome. Was there then any meaningful difference between the twins? Wilhelmine seemed to be saying that there was not.

This could be taken to mean that great tides of history were self-sustaining enough to bear the death of a single man. Or it could mean that Romulus had had no cause to kill Remus, his twin, his other self. The Duchess had been right, her mother's opera was many-layered. What a loss that woman was.

Nevertheless, Voltaire found the second half of the opera slightly frustrating, in that he'd been hoping for one thing and been given another. Instead of political commentary, the singers sang of torn loyalties and a divided family. The justice that the young shepherdess cried out for was that of a slain brother, not of a cause.

But the Calas tragedy had been personal too, hadn't it? As an outsider, Voltaire had the luxury of thinking of it abstractly, as a failure of the judicial system, but Jean Calas had left behind a family that mourned him, just as this Remus had. And Wilhelmine grieved Friedrich terribly, just as Voltaire did, and he could hardly blame her for giving artistic vent to their feelings.

Then the ghost of Remus appeared. Voltaire, moved to tears, listened to the countertenor virtuoso filling the hall with sound, and something began to niggle in the back of his mind. It was too easy to make overly simplistic equations, when Wilhelmine had lost two brothers and mourned them both. As Friederike had said, there was necessarily more than one interpretation.

But to take the straightforward route for a moment, just for the sake of argument...if Pythagoras symbolized Voltaire, then had Wilhelmine made Remus the philosopher king cut down too early only so she could put words to her grief? Or did she have another motive?

The great denouement began. Watching as the gods declared that Remus' fate had been death at the hands of his brother, not voluntary exile, Voltaire could almost feel his pen in his hand; he could see the lines he'd written as if he had the page before him. _In this strange affair of the Calas family, it was a question of religion, suicide, parricide; it was a question of knowing if a father and a mother had strangled their son to please God, if a brother had strangled his brother._ At last, too late for Jean Calas, the court that had condemned the father had declared the truth. Suicide, after all, not filicide.

Now Voltaire considered the new panorama before his mind's eye. Two Hohenzollern brothers, dead. Wilhelmine, wholeheartedly devoted to Friedrich. Remus, giver of protection to exiled philosophers, crying out on stage that he had been murdered at the hands of his brother. Justice, unfulfilled.

That meant...

When the Duchess, in the seat beside him, nudged him, Voltaire realized the entire audience was applauding madly, and he was sitting like a statue. "Didn't you like it?"

"Like it…" he echoed faintly. "'Like' is too feeble a word. I have been living it for the last several hours." 

_That a man can be killed with no trial worthy of the name, and there be no outcry and no consequences--I couldn't stand for it._

Shaking himself out of the trance, Voltaire joined in the enthusiastic applause, then turned to his companion. Friederike looked tentatively excited. "Does that mean you might turn it into a play, Uncle Voltaire?"

Voltaire smiled enigmatically at her. "I rather think your mother's piece deserves to be brought to life on a much wider stage, don't you agree?"

**Author's Note:**

>  **Acknowledgements**  
>  With more thanks than I can express for my beta raspberryhunter, who made it possible to produce a fic with this many words and this much plot in just 7 weeks. She contributed so much material that she straddled the line between beta and co-author. As a result, we went back and forth on whether this fic, with its 90/10 split in contributions, should be listed with one author or two. Though in the end we decided not to formally list her as co-creator, there are really 1.5 authors, so happy Yuletide from both of us!  
>   
>  **Major Historical Departures (spoilers)**   
> This has been a canon-divergent AU. For details on how events played out in real life, see especially these posts on [Glasow](https://rheinsberg.dreamwidth.org/tag/christian+friedrich+glasow) and [Wilhelm's humiliation and death](https://rheinsberg.dreamwidth.org/10642.html).
> 
> The surprise attack at Leuthen, in December 1757, was successful, considered by many to be Friedrich's greatest victory, and it left Silesia in Prussian hands. In order to situate the fic at a point in time in which Wilhelm has just died, the military situation is dire enough for Friedrich's suicide to be plausible, and Wilhelmine has long enough to live that she can travel to Berlin and put on her detective hat, the military history had to be changed. Fictional Leuthen allows the Prussians to declare a tactical victory, but it's strategically inconclusive. These changes enabled Wilhelm's death to be moved from mid 1758 to early 1758.
> 
> You can consider the single point of divergence to be Glasow not being imprisoned in early 1757. That allowed him to betray Friedrich at Leuthen, which leads to Friedrich's second humiliation (the first one is real; the second one fictional) of Wilhelm, which in turn helps push Heinrich past his limits of forbearance. (Friedrich's self-justifying letter about Wilhelm's death is totally historical, though.) Glasow still being at large in early 1758 also provides Heinrich with temptation that wasn't present historically. And there you have a dark AU.  
>   
>  **Minor Historical Departures (spoilers)**  
>  Carl von Pirch, Friedrich's favored page, died from a gun misfire in 1757. In order to have a named individual, about whom we know something, for Amalie to question, this fic allows him to survive badly injured.
> 
> Henri de Catt didn't join Friedrich as reader until March 1758, but it's true he had a standing offer before that, so in this fic, he joins in late 1757.
> 
> Friederike visited Voltaire in Ferney in 1773, and they cried over Wilhelmine together. For the sake of allowing Voltaire to attend Wilhelmine's opera in Wilhelmine's opera house, this has been changed to Voltaire visiting Friederike in Bayreuth in 1764.
> 
> Friedrich did write a poem in 1758 expressing a wish to die on the same day as Wilhelmine so they could be buried "with one grave enclosing our intermingling dust," but they died nearly thirty years apart and are buried in Potsdam and Bayreuth: him next to his favorite dogs (including Alcmene), and her next to her daughter Friederike. Because Wilhelmine dies in Berlin in this fic and because she and Friedrich both die soon after he wrote that poem, I couldn't resist burying them together.  
>   
>  **Misc**  
>  I could not make "hero-poet-philosopher-warrior-mischievous-singular-brilliant-proud-modest" up: that's vintage Voltaire describing Friedrich in [January 1758](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondance_de_Voltaire/1758/Lettre_3514), hyphens and all.
> 
> Sequel: Feel free to write one! I have no immediate plans, though I'm not ruling it out.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In the Shadow of... Everyone Else](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28250496) by [raspberryhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter)




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